And you also had to feed and house the technicians, security teams, and the missileers, which was the name for the officers trained to operate the Minuteman (which immediately made me picture some sort of bizarre, dark universe Mouseketeer). It wasn’t just manning the launch stations it included maintaining all the electronics, the miles of electrical cables underground connecting silos to the launch controls, the silos themselves, the launch control facilities, and the roads to everything.

The amount of manpower it took to maintain 24- 7 vigilance 365 days a year was huge. I found it impressive and scary at the same time. Also, each Minuteman’s 1.2 megaton warhead was 60 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The kids were impressed by the technology behind the Minuteman Missiles- they could reach speeds of over 15,000 miles per hour, reaching the USSR in just 30 minutes from here. (There were other ICBM- InterContinental Ballistic Missiles- sites in the Great Plains, including for Atlas, Titan, and the interestingly named Peacekeeper missiles, but Minuteman missiles were the most common.) Several of the six missile wings have since been deactivated, including this area, which was deactivated in 1993. So What Is The Minuteman Missile National Historic Site?įrom the mid 1960s thru the early 1990s, there were 1000 Minuteman Missile Silos and a 100 Launch Control Facilities in the Great Plains (specifically the Dakotas, Montana, Missouri, Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska). Interesting and easy to get to? Sign me up! This is one of only two places in America where you can see a Cold War era missile silo according to the NPS website.Īnd all of it is easily reachable from the interstate between Rapid City and Badlands National Park.

And I thought the museum setup was a great combo of exploring the exhibits and viewing the film in the Visitor Center with actually seeing the sites in person. The kids found the Minuteman missile story and the idea of hundreds of nuclear warheads below farmland fascinating. It was an awesome stop for us on our weeklong trip around the Dakotas. Focused on telling the story of the Minuteman Missiles and their importance in the Cold War, this historic site was a hit with both the kids and the adults in our family and we learned a lot in our short time. The Minuteman Missile National Historic Site is one of those great smaller sites among the 423 areas in the National Park System. But sometimes the bite-sized sites are easier to digest (really wearing out that food metaphor there). Same thing with national parks sometimes- there is so much to see (and so many fellow humans also trying to see it) that it can be too much to ingest. That isn’t to say that the Louvre isn’t great, but often times they remember only how big it was and not anything about, you know, art. You might think that there isn’t enough there to capture the kids’ interest but actually because the subject matter is often so focused, they focus better. I find that sometimes smaller monuments, parks, and museums are often my favorite. The Minuteman Missile National Historic Site Is Absolutely Worth A Stop On A Trip To South Dakota

Minuteman missile silo blast door