1964, Air Force 1st Lt. Robert Jacobs, Photo-optical Instrument Officer for the 1369th Photo Squadron, at Vandenburg AFB, CA (missile base on the coast). He was in charge of photo-optical instrumentation at a tracking site in Big Sur, CA (the coast) 124 miles away. His mission was to film an Atlas rocket go through all three stages of powered flight. This particular mission was part of the Nike-Zeus objective for the development of an anti-missile missile at the height of the Cold War. "What we photographed up there affected me for the rest of my life. We were looking down S-SW and the missile popped up through the fog, and it was just beautiful. And our guys on our M45 tracking mount with 180 inch lenses on it got it, and sure enough we could see all three stages of powered flight as they burned up and dropped away. And then of course to the naked eye all we saw was a kind of a smoke trail going off into sub-space. So we whoopied and shouted and heard the film wrap off in the BU telescope, and figured well that was our first big deal, and we got it." He took the cans of film to Vandenburg that night.
The section of footage on CNN showing the disabling of the rocket is a re-enactment. Jacobs states that the interesting part of the footage was confiscated.
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