Video of Spectacular Minotaur IV Night Launch
Video Caption: An Orbital ATK Minotaur IV rocket has successfully lifted off from Cape Canaveral’s launch pad 46 at 06:04 UTC, August 26th 2017. This was the 6th launch and 1st from Cape Canaveral. The rocket carried the ORS-5 payload for the US Air Force.
8 responses to “Video of Spectacular Minotaur IV Night Launch”
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The joke of ORS is that the closest thing the world has to an ORS launch vehicle is the second largest (in terms of throw weight) launch vehicle, and runs of liquid fuels. All SX has to do is keep a 1st and 2nd stage extra in the queue waiting to be pre-empted by an ORS launch. It’s even conceivable an air force could operate them as a squadron with a scheduled flight rate.
An other side to this is how ORS morphed into a kind of generic small satellite group, while other people do something actually operationally responsive — such as the launch of the replacement UFO satellite that was built simultaneously with its booster and launched in a year. The ORS-5 took longer than that. Oh, and you know who was running the mission assurance for this? The Aerospace Corp. — another entity whose mission crept into doing something marginally useful instead of the original idea.
That Minotaur rocket didn’t muck around, when it took off, it went like a bat out of Hell. 🙂
ICBMs are designed that way to escape being destroyed by incoming warheads.
Less to do with incoming warheads and more to do with physics and chemistry of solid fuels.
Which is one reason they use solid fuel for ICBMs. Another is that a rocket is able to sit around for years and then launch with only a few minutes notice.
Thanks for your reply, Thomas, that certainly would be a benefit. I’m no rocket scientist, but, I should imagine that it’s the nature of the beast. Some factors influencing it’s performance, would be, containing solid fuel, sloshing effects are non existent, the solid fuel would act to increase structural support and that, never having a human cargo, would make pulling g’s not so much of a critical factor. All in all, they put on a really good show. Regards, Paul.
Yes, but for real speed there was nothing like the old Sprint ABM system. A video of the launch of one. Zero to Mach 10 in 5 seconds…
https://www.youtube.com/wat…