RIM-8 Talos
The Talos was a Navy missile from the Bumblebee program and was primarily a surface-to-air missile but could be used effectively against ships and shore targets. It was equipped with a solid-fuel booster which fired for a few seconds and then a ramjet engine acted as the sustainer motor. Talos had a range out beyond 65 miles and could reach extremely high altitudes. It could carry a conventional or nuclear warhead. The missile was 30 feet long, 30 inches in diameter and weighed 3,000 pounds --- 7,000 pounds with the booster.
The first firing at White Sands was in 1951. At the Navy's launch complex 35 a prototype missile ship called the Desert Ship was built for testing the missile's performance. The first firing of Talos at sea took place in Feb. 1959 from the USS Galveston.
As part of the Navy's Fiscal Year 1956 shipbuilding and conversion program the never-commissioned light cruiser Galveston (CL-93), a member of the Atlantic Reserve Fleet since mid-1946, was taken out of "mothballs" and turned over to the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard for reconstruction as a guided missile ship. Redesignated CLG-93 in February 1956, as work was beginning, she received her difinitive hull number, CLG-3, in May 1957. Galveston was commissioned in May 1958 as the Navy's first ship to carry the "Talos" guided missile, a long-range, and quite large, anti-aircraft weapon. The ship had been extensively modified, especially aft of amidships, to equip her with magazines, a launcher and the radars associated with this new weapons system, and her first three years of active service were largely spent testing the "Talos" at sea off the U.S. East Coast and in the Caribbean region.
