Vandenberg Air Force Base, California: Sept. 2009

At Vandenberg AFB in California, we visited this crater, which is all that's left of a Titan missile silo that exploded in the early 1960s. It's amazing that these ICBMs weren't involved in more accidents, and a lucky thing too. We were there to collect data on old Air Force facilities, part of the DoD's Legacy program to save data on its historic sites. Vandenberg has the distinction of being an Air Force base that is focused on missiles and rockets rather than on conventional fixed wing aircraft. So the base consists mainly of old rocket gantries posted like sentinels along the foggy central California coastline.