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Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Space Launch Complex 17
Space Launch Complex 17 (SLC-17), previously designated Launch Complex 17 (LC-17), was a launch site at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS), Florida used for Thor and Delta launch vehicles launches between 1958 and 2011. It was built in 1956 for use with the PGM-17 Thor missile, the first operational ballistic missile in the arsenal of the United States. More recently the launch complex has been used for vehicles in the Delta launch vehicle family, derived from the Thor missile, to launch probes to the Moon and planets, solar observatories and weather satellites. SLC-17 features two expendable launch vehicle (ELV) launch pads, 17A and 17B. The pads were operated by the 45th Space Wing and have supported more than 300 Department of Defense, NASA and commercial missile and rocket launches. Following the last military launch, in August 2009, SLC-17A was withdrawn from use, and LC-17B was transferred to NASA (SLC-17B) for two remaining launches. Pad 17A supported its firs ...
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Delta II
Delta II was an expendable launch system, originally designed and built by McDonnell Douglas. Delta II was part of the Delta rocket family and entered service in 1989. Delta II vehicles included the Delta 6000, and the two later Delta 7000 variants ("Light" and "Heavy"). The rocket flew its final mission ICESat-2 on 15 September 2018, earning the launch vehicle a streak of 100 successful missions in a row, with the last failure being GPS IIR-1 in 1997. History In the early 1980s, all United States expendable launch vehicles were planned to be phased out in favor of the Space Shuttle, which would be responsible for all government and commercial launches. Production of Delta, Atlas-Centaur, and Titan 34D had ended. The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, ''Challenger'' disaster of 1986 and the subsequent halt of Shuttle operations changed this policy, and President Ronald Reagan announced in December 1986 that the Space Shuttle would no longer launch commercial payloads, and NA ...
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Delta L
The Delta L, Thor-Delta L, or Thrust-Augmented Long Tank Thor-Delta was a US expendable launch system used to launch the Pioneer E and TETR satellites in 1969 (failed) and HEOS satellite in 1972. It was a member of the Delta family of rockets. The Delta L was a three-stage rocket. The first stage was a Long Tank Thor, a stretched version of the Thor missile, augmented by three Castor-2 solid rocket boosters. The second stage was the Delta E. An FW-1D solid rocket motor was used as the third stage. The first launch of the Delta L took place on 27 August 1969, from Launch Complex 17A at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. A defective valve caused plumbing in the hydraulics system to rupture and leak fluid, causing first-stage engine gimbaling to fail around minutes into launch. The stage completed its burn successfully, but threw the second stage far off course. Orbital velocity could not be achieved, and Range Safety sent the destruct command at T+383 seconds. Neither the ...
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Thor (rocket Family)
Thor was a US space launch vehicle derived from the PGM-17 Thor intermediate-range ballistic missile. The Thor rocket was the first member of the Delta rocket family of space launch vehicles. The last launch of a direct derivative of the Thor missile occurred in 2018 as the first stage of the final Delta II. Thor-Able Thor was first used as a launch vehicle during the testing program of the warhead reentry vehicle for the Atlas missile. For these three tests a Thor core stage was topped by the Able second stage. Able used the Aerojet AJ-10-40 engine from the Vanguard second stage. The first such launch, 116, was lost on 23 April 1958 due to a turbopump failure in the main engine. The recovery of the reentry vehicles on the succeeding two attempts were not successful. Three mice, one on each vehicle, died in these tests. The Able stage from the Atlas reentry vehicle tests was upgraded to become the Able I with a third stage consisting of an unguided Altair X-248 solid-fuel ro ...
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Florida
Florida is a state located in the Southeastern region of the United States. Florida is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean, and to the south by the Straits of Florida and Cuba; it is the only state that borders both the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. Spanning , Florida ranks 22nd in area among the 50 states, and with a population of over 21 million, it is the third-most populous. The state capital is Tallahassee, and the most populous city is Jacksonville. The Miami metropolitan area, with a population of almost 6.2 million, is the most populous urban area in Florida and the ninth-most populous in the United States; other urban conurbations with over one million people are Tampa Bay, Orlando, and Jacksonville. Various Native American groups have inhabited Florida for at least 14,000 years. In 1513, Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León became th ...
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Delta III
Delta III was an expendable launch vehicle made by Boeing. The vehicle was developed from the highly-successful Delta II to help meet the launch demand of larger satellites. The first Delta III launch was on August 26, 1998. Of its three flights, the first two were failures, and the third, though declared successful, reached the low end of its targeted orbit range and carried only a dummy (inert) payload. The Delta III could deliver up to to geostationary transfer orbit, twice the payload of its predecessor, the Delta II. Under the four-digit designation system from earlier Delta rockets, the Delta III is classified as the Delta 8930. Description Delta III was developed from the Delta II rocket. The new vehicle sported a somewhat similar first stage, but a new, more efficient upper stage. This led to Delta III having around double the payload capacity of Delta II. However, the consecutive failures of the initial Delta IIIs, combined with the more advanced Delta IV program a ...
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Delta 4000
The Delta 4000 series was an American expendable launch system which was used to conduct two orbital launches in 1989 and 1990. It was a member of the Delta family of rockets. Although several variants were put forward, only the Delta 4925 was launched. The designations used a four digit numerical code to store information on the configuration of the rocket. It was built from a combination of spare parts left over from earlier Delta rockets, which were being retired, and parts from the Delta II 6000-series, which was just entering service. The first stage was the MB-3-III powered Extended Long Tank Thor, previously flown on the 1000-series. Nine Castor-4A solid rocket boosters were attached to increase thrust at lift-off, replacing the less powerful Castor-4 boosters used on the 3000 series. The Delta-K was used as a second stage. A Star-48B PAM-D was used as a third stage, to boost payloads into geosynchronous transfer orbit. Both Delta 4000 launches occurred from Lau ...
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Delta 1000
The Delta 1000 series (also referred to as Straight-Eight) was an American expendable launch system which was used to conduct eight orbital launches between 1972 and 1975. It was a member of the Delta family of rockets. Several variants existed, differentiated by a four digit numerical code. Delta 1000 was developed by McDonnell Douglas company (now — Boeing) in 1972. The same first stage and boosters were used on all variants. The first stage was an Extended Long Tank Thor, a further stretched version of the Long Tank Thor used on earlier versions, itself derived from the Thor missile. Four, six or nine Castor-2 solid rocket boosters were attached to increase thrust at lift-off. These improvements permitted the Delta 1000 series to lift 1,835 kg (4,045 lbs) to LEO or 635 kg (1,400 lbs) to GTO. The nickname "Straight-Eight" comes from the fact that its second stage variants had the same 8 ft. (2.4 m) diameter as the first stage; previous Delta second stages were smal ...
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Thor DSV-2G
Thor (; from non, Þórr ) is a prominent god in Germanic paganism. In Norse mythology, he is a hammer-wielding god associated with lightning, thunder, storms, sacred groves and trees, strength, the protection of humankind, hallowing, and fertility. Besides Old Norse , the deity occurs in Old English as , in Old Frisian as ', in Old Saxon as ', and in Old High German as , all ultimately stemming from the Proto-Germanic theonym , meaning 'Thunder'. Thor is a prominently mentioned god throughout the recorded history of the Germanic peoples, from the Roman occupation of regions of , to the Germanic expansions of the Migration Period, to his high popularity during the Viking Age, when, in the face of the process of the Christianization of Scandinavia, emblems of his hammer, , were worn and Norse pagan personal names containing the name of the god bear witness to his popularity. Due to the nature of the Germanic corpus, narratives featuring Thor are only attested in Old Norse ...
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Thor DSV-2F
Thor (; from non, Þórr ) is a prominent god in Germanic paganism. In Norse mythology, he is a hammer-wielding æsir, god associated with lightning, thunder, storms, sacred trees and groves in Germanic paganism and mythology, sacred groves and trees, Physical strength, strength, the protection of humankind, hallowing, and fertility. Besides Old Norse , the deity occurs in Old English as , in Old Frisian as ', in Old Saxon as ', and in Old High German as , all ultimately stemming from the Proto-Germanic theonym , meaning 'Thunder'. Thor is a prominently mentioned god throughout the recorded history of the Germanic peoples, from the Roman Empire, Roman occupation of regions of , to the Germanic expansions of the Migration Period, to his high popularity during the Viking Age, when, in the face of the process of the Christianization of Scandinavia, emblems of his hammer, , were worn and Norse paganism, Norse pagan personal names containing the name of the god bear witness to his ...
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Thor-Ablestar
The Thor-Ablestar, or Thor-Able-Star, also known as Thor-Epsilon was an early American expendable launch system consisting of a PGM-17 Thor missile, with an Ablestar upper stage. It was a member of the Thor family of rockets, and was derived from the Thor-Able. The Ablestar second stage was an enlarged version of the Able, which gave the Thor-Ablestar a greater payload capacity compared to the Thor-Able. It also incorporated restart capabilities, allowing a multiple-burn trajectory to be flown, further increasing payload, or allowing the rocket to reach different orbits. It was the first rocket to be developed with such a capability and development of the stage took a mere eight months. Nineteen Thor-Ablestar were launched between 1960–1965, of which four failed, and a fifth resulted in a partial failure, as only one of two payloads separated from the upper stage. The first failure was the launch of Courier 1A, an experimental communications satellite, on 19 August 1960 when ...
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GRAIL
The Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) was an American lunar science mission in NASA's Discovery Program which used high-quality gravitational field mapping of the Moon to determine its interior structure. The two small spacecraft GRAIL A (Ebb) and GRAIL B (Flow) were launched on 10 September 2011 aboard a single launch vehicle: the most-powerful configuration of a Delta II, the 7920H-10. GRAIL A separated from the rocket about nine minutes after launch, GRAIL B followed about eight minutes later. They arrived at their orbits around the Moon 25 hours apart. The first probe entered orbit on 31 December 2011 and the second followed on 1 January 2012. The two spacecraft impacted the Lunar surface on December 17, 2012. Overview Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was GRAIL's principal investigator. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory managed the project. NASA budgeted US$496 million for the program to include spacecraft and instrument development, ...
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Delta 3000
The Delta 3000 series was an American expendable launch system which was used to conduct 38 orbital launches between 1975 and 1989. It was a member of the Delta family of rockets. Several variants existed, which were differentiated by a four digit numerical code. Configurations The first stage was the RS-27 powered Extended Long Tank Thor, first flown on the 2000-series. Three or nine Castor-4 solid rocket boosters (SRB) were attached to increase thrust at lift-off, replacing the less powerful Castor-2 boosters used on earlier models. Two second stages were available; the Delta-P, which had been flown on the Delta 1000 and 2000 series, or the Delta-K, an uprated version with the Aerojet engine. Some launches used a three-stage configuration in order to reach higher orbits. A Star-37D, Star-37E, or Star-48B PAM-D could be used as an upper stage. Launches with PAM-D upper stages were designated ''Delta 3XX0 PAM-D'', rather than assigning a code to the upper stage for us ...
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