Titan missile silo for sale

Got $1.5 million lying around? You can buy this Titan Missile Silo and wait out the apocalypse. Not sure where the silo is, but the real estate agent (who wants a $10,000 "earnest money" escrow before he'll show it to you) has an Orange County 949 area code.

The Missile Base consists of 57 acres of real estate. The center secured portion of the property is protected by the original barbed-wire-topped chainlink fence. There is a paved road leading into the property with dual entry gates.

Above ground is the original 40 X 100 shop building, two concrete targeting structures, two manufactured homes, two 8 X 8 X 40 storage containers, and the silo tops of the three missile silos, two antenna silos, one entry portal and a few other misc structures.

Below ground is a huge complex consisting of 16 buildings and thousands of feet of connecting tunnels. The major underground structures are:

Three - 160' Tall Missile Silos
Three - 4 story Equipment Terminal Buildings
Three - Fuel Terminal Buildings
Two - 6 story Antenna Silos
One Air Intake/Filtration Building
One 100' diameter Control Dome Building
One 125' diameter Power Dome Building
One - 6 story Entry Portal Building
and a few other misc buildings and areas.

Link (via Futurismic)

Update: In the comments, the Good Reverend sez, "Not only is it for sale, but it's listed on eBay. It's part of the former Larsen Air Force Base in central Washington."

• [jphilby]

  Underground millionaire raves. The next thing.

  Central WA: that’s near the big bottomless pit with all the cows innit. Or wait: maybe this is it?

• [Anonymous]

  Only problem with buying one of these for a survivalist is: are you sure Russia is no longer targeting that particular site?

  I suppose you could ask them!

• [dculberson]

  #11, it never ceases to amaze me how bad the photos are on TV show web sites. This Old House is the same way. 400×300 grainy vidcap pix? In 2007?

• [cstatman]

  Skep’s right. Closed Source Real Estate. Feh.

  Pay $10k just to look? and the realtor is in LA? sorry, as badly as I want an evil lair? There is just too much going against this.

• [Bevatron Repairman]

  Can I invite Michael Madsen to my housewarming party? “Turn the key, sir. Sir. Sir!”

• [TC Giant]

  Sold!

• [good reverend]

  Not only is it for sale, but it’s listed on eBay.

  It’s part of the former Larsen Air Force Base in central Washington.

• [anothershamus]

  Didn’t those go for $10.00 back in the 80′s? I knew that it would have been a good investment but I was worried about the residual radiation.

• [Veteran Military Wife at Life Lessons of a Military Wife]

  Did you know Home and Garden TV did a remodeling special on one of the missile silo homes? Check the site below for pics, plans and commentaries. Apparently, these homes have a very large following in the US.

  http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/remodeling/article/0,1797,HGTV_3659_1641541,00.html

• [osiris7]

  Aw, @#&*^%! I forgot the password to unlock the 20-ton blast door. From the inside.

• [V]

  “For Sale: country home, nice prairie views, tall ceilings…”

  There is an old Atlas silo near where I grew up that’s been converted to a home…

  http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/Central/08/02/silo.sweet.silo/

  Here’s a video tour of that site.
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoDcnbevOy8

  Cue Damnation Alley theme…..

• [Skep]

  From the Ebay listing:

  I was wondering if you had any pictures of the interior of this property.
  thank you
  Sorry, not for public display. There is great value in the “unknown – what’s down there”. Curiosity seekers are willing to pay for tours to see “what’s down there”.

  Sorry, I don’t do closed source real estate…

• [abq halsey]

  it would appear this this is the same type of site.

  http://triggur.org/silo/

  virtual irr-regal exploration of an abandoned base.

• [mgabrys]

  They were selling a Titan 1 missle silo complex in Denver near DIA in 1999 for around 150-250k. The Titan 2 silo is quite snug by comparison and can be toured in Arizona. The Titan 1 complexes were monsters of Dr. Strangelovian proportions.

  I did some research on the one for sale in Colorado, and the largest problems with them were the residual toxins associated with the fuels and other chemicals found in use by the early missle programs of the day. They required clean-up by the military so the good news is you wouldn’t be on the fiscal hook for said clean-up.

  “When” the clean-up would be completed was a – big – variable at the time. On another good note, the one in Colorado – if it’s still for sale – was connected to the grid meaning it had available power for refurbishment.

  Just the place to survive X-atmospheres of overpressure from a 1 megaton nuclear strike and still get satelite TV from your own raised tracking array. Once the background surface radiation clears, you’re free to move about the remainder of the country.

  (Note: offer of survivability does not extend to Titan 2 silos. All but one – perhaps 2 – were dismantled by treaty. That and their long-term survivability (air) options were drastically reduced).

• [bogus]

  i hope however much of my tax money that went into building and maintaining the complex is refunded when they sell it!

• [Gijs]

  Here are some high resolution images:
  http://www.themissilebase.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/016_8A.195181018.jpg
  http://www.themissilebase.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/004_21A.195180650.jpg
  http://www.themissilebase.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/005_20.195180804.jpg

• [JackCastile]

  The guy wants $10K in escrow and he can’t post a few lousy pics of the place?

• [gitaiba]

  I grew up in Southeast New Mexico, Roswell, specifically, and as teenagers, we used to break into the abandoned and poorly secured missile silos that littered our area. There was one near Portales, one near Ruidoso, and one other I can’t quite remember. They’d all been sealed up with iron plates over the doors, but someone had used an arc welder to cut out squares from the corners, just large enough for an adult to crawl through. It had been done ages before, judging by the amount of rust around the edges (this was the desert, after all). We’d be bored, drive out to one, clear away the massive black widow webs that covered the entrance, and begin descending down into the silo. There were several flights of stairs leading down to what we thought was the control room, which was the only sizable room in the entire space. It was a large room with concrete walls, and we could see where equipment had once been bolted to the walls, but they were stripped completely bare when the military left. You took another few flights down rickety metal stairs, and then you were at the edge of the actual silo, which could best be described as a cyclopean maw. I was in physics that year, and we dropped rocks and calculated that the depth was 1800 feet, though God only knows if our math was correct. Still, it looked like a bottomless pit.

  I can hardly believe we did it, and that we were often stoned when we did, but we wandered all over those silos. We using rusting metal tracks that I assume were intended for machinery as ladders. In one, there were the “shakers,” beams that began vibrating as soon as you stepped on them. You had to run across without thinking about it, or you’d lose your balance and fall to your death. One of my friends led someone’s 13 year old brother through the Ruidoso silo, and a metal grating collapsed beneath him. She was sure he was dead, but fortunately, the space he fell into had filled with water over the years, and though he was filthy and cold, he’d only fallen a few feet before hitting water. Still, I know that right now, teenagers in Roswell are doing the same thing, and probably will til someone actually dies, and they’re sealed up properly.

• [Wil Wheaton]

  Any real estate agent who wants $10K in escrow before showing a property, and won’t even show *pictures* of the property is a douchebag.

  In fact, the only bigger douchebag is the douchebag who give this douchebag the $10K.

• [Jennifer Emick]

  My husband grew up on a repurposed Nike site, and we lived there until about four years ago. Trust me, it’s not worth the work to make the places livable. Lead in the walls, paper phone lines…and there’s a definite down side to blast-proof floors.

  Also, they want way more money than it’s worth.

• [PT]

  If this is at Larsen, then this silo has shown up for sale several times in the past few years. The price has come down a bit. Here’s a link to a local news item from 2004, or 2006, it isn’t clear which: http://www.komotv.com/news/archive/4120821.html

  Last year there were photos of the interior all over the web – enormous hemispherical rooms full of trash and flooded pits 100 feet deep. Very impressive, but not realtor-friendly. I also recall from last year that some of the 57 surface acres were occupied by third parties and they were basically selling the underground only. Caveat emptor.

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden/Moderator]

  Sure, like Brits do martello towers.

• [chasie]

  From eBay:

  “I think it would make a really neat resort/camp/retreat facility.”

  Call me crazy, but an underground concrete bunker has about as much charm as…well…an underground concrete bunker. Unless you hang some rugs on the wall or something.

• [eightway]

  I’ve been in this silo. It’s in terrible condition (as other posts and pics show). A group of about 6 of us posed as a group of investors interesting in buying the project. He asked for no earnest money. Really, we were trying to sccout out a location for a fundraising party for our Burning Man camp.

  The owner, a quirky guy, gave us a multi-hour tour of the silos, generator dome, and command centers. Very impressive engineering, but also a sickening waste of money (it was dismantled only a couple years later when the Titan 2 program started).

  The owner was convinced that with the right investment someone could put a multi-story destination resort on it. Pretty hilarious considering it’s in the middle of nowhere in central WA.

• [woolie]

  This would make an awesome datacenter. :)

• [shiftclick]

  I’m a hollowed-out-mountain type of guy.

  Always have been. Always will be.