Talk:USNS Range Recoverer

Missile Ranges

At the time (Wikipedia is miserable in this sequencing with only a modern worm's eye view of the history) the ship was assigned to the Navy's Pacific Missile Range. From PD official site (my emphasis):

In May 1958 the Army transferred the southern portion of Camp Cooke to the U.S. Navy. Renamed the Naval Missile Facility at Point Arguello (NMFPA), it consisted of more than 19,800 acres. The Secretary of Defense authorized the transfer and directed the Navy to begin establishing a Pacific Missile Range (PMR) with a headquarters one hundred miles south of Cooke at Point Mugu, and instrumentation sites along the California coast and at various islands down range in the Pacific Ocean. NMFPA would become a major launch head and range safety center for all missile and satellite launch operations conducted within the PMR. In agreements signed between the Navy and the Air Force, the Navy received command and control authority for virtually all launches conducted from Vandenberg. This relationship lasted less than seven years.

On 16 November 1963, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara ordered a restructuring of missile ranges and flight test facilities across the nation. Part of the force restructuring had the Navy transfer major sections of its Pacific Missile Range, including its entire Point Arguello installation, to the Air Force in two parts. The first transfer occurred on 1 July 1964. In the second part of the transfer, remote properties and mobile resources were handed over to Vandenberg on 1 February 1965. These included sites at Pillar Point, California; Kokee Park, Hawaii; South Point, Hawaii; Canton, Midway, and Wake Islands in the mid-Pacific; Eniwetok and Bikini Atolls in the Marshall Islands; and six range instrumented ships (Huntsville, Longview, Range Tracker, Richfield, Sunnyvale, and Watertown). With the Navy's missile program and range authorities essentially scaled back to the area around Point Mugu, the Air Force now assumed full responsibility for missile range safety at Vandenberg and over much of the Pacific Ocean. The Air Force renamed this geographical area the Air Force Western Test Range and established an organization by the same name. The designations remained until 1979 when it was shortened to the Western Test Range. Meanwhile, the fleet of ships which had increased to eleven by 1968, and was also supporting NASA's manned space program at Cape Canaveral, Florida, was gradually phased out as land-based tracking and monitoring systems became more accurate and reliable. In January 1975, the last range ship, the USNS Sunnyvale, was mothballed. For similar reasons, most of the island instrumentation sites were also transferred to other agencies.

Note that this ship is not among those transferred and in fact shifted July 1962, well before Air Force takeover July 1964, to the Atlantic supporting NASA at Wallops Island before the Air Force takeover of PMR. Range Recoverer was only associated with the Navy's Pacific Missile Range. Palmeira (talk) 14:05, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

Hello, you have just helped me to understand the context of the links on the Pacific missile disambiguation page, cause they are lacking in this respect. Given the rather elaborate explanations you've given here, wouldn't it be best to either add them to a new article on the Pacific missile range, let's say pre 1970s, either to add a section on Western Range explaining the history of the PMR? --Midas02 (talk) 14:27, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, even though it is outside my main interest here—ships with a sideline of WW II. I left a comment on Talk:Western Range back in 2013 about this gaping chasm of history and terminology, but nobody took it up. I'm familiar with the subject, mainly 1960s—70s, but haven't bothered to research the necessary "reliable sources" to do a real update. One little problem is that old terminology lingers so that some of us used "PMR" long after it officially became Air Force Western Test Range/Western Test Range and I know it got into memos as such well after the transfer. Guess I should take on a revision. Over in the Wiki ships we have something similar with shipyard lineage so I think the title should maybe be current with history added. Then there are bifurcations. Navy kept a smaller range, including one of the Channel Islands if I remember correctly, for testing tactical naval missiles. I was thinking about it some today and I was curious about the Army heritage too. Remember, it was Army that got those V-2s and Navy took over some Army test facility. If I recall, the Navy's give to Air Force and those ships was how a bunch of ships became USAF Ship in another oddity of military ships. Yep, there were USAF ships, though I think MSTS/MSC may have provided crewing under DoD policy. Have to check that out too. Palmeira (talk) 01:41, 17 June 2015 (UTC)