Downrange, or down range, is the horizontal distance traveled by a

spacecraft A spacecraft is a vehicle or machine designed to fly in outer space. A type of artificial satellite, spacecraft are used for a variety of purposes, including communications, Earth observation, meteorology, navigation, space colonization, p ...

, or the spacecraft's horizontal distance from the

launch site A spaceport or cosmodrome is a site for launching or receiving spacecraft, by analogy to a seaport for ships or an airport for aircraft. The word ''spaceport'', and even more so ''cosmodrome'', has traditionally been used for sites capable ...

. More often, it is used as an adverb or adjective specifying the direction of that travel being measured in a horizontal direction. In

military slang Military slang is an array of colloquial terminology used commonly by military personnel, including slang which is unique to or originates with the armed forces. In English-speaking countries, it often takes the form of abbreviations/acronyms or d ...

, ''downrange'' is a term for being deployed overseas, usually in a war zone. It is also the name of a

comic strip A comic strip is a sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st ...

published in the newspaper Stars and Stripes. It can also refer to the direction of fire: away from the source and in the direction of the target. In the 1960s and 1970s, a down range tracking system existed at

Gulkula The Garma Festival of Traditional Cultures (Garma) is Australia's largest Indigenous Australians, Indigenous cultural gathering, taking place over four days each August in northeast Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory, Australia. Hosted by the ...

, in the

Northern Territory The Northern Territory (commonly abbreviated as NT; formally the Northern Territory of Australia) is an states and territories of Australia, Australian territory in the central and central northern regions of Australia. The Northern Territory ...

of Australia, to track rockets launched from the

Woomera Test Range The RAAF Woomera Range Complex (WRC) is a major Australian military and civil aerospace facility and operation located in South Australia, approximately north-west of Adelaide. The WRC is operated by the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), a di ...

South Australia South Australia (commonly abbreviated as SA) is a state in the southern central part of Australia. It covers some of the most arid parts of the country. With a total land area of , it is the fourth-largest of Australia's states and territories ...

References

Spaceflight concepts {{spacecraft-stub