$400M Titan 4B Rocket Blasts Off
Shattering the afternoon calm, a $400 million Air Force Titan 4B rocket carrying a $250 million missile early warning satellite blasted off at 12:01 p.m. Monday from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, CBS News Space Consultant William Harwood reports.
The launching originally was scheduled for 9:30 a.m., but the flight was held up two-and-a-half hours because of problems with an Eastern Range communications circuit and trouble closing an access door on the Titan 4B first stage.
Once the access door was properly latched, the countdown proceeded smoothly to zero when the Titan's two solid-fuel strap-on boosters ignited with a crackling roar, instantly pushing the 19-story-tall rocket skyward. Two minutes later, as the vehicle arced east over the Atlantic Ocean, the Titan's first-stage engines ignited, the solid-fuel boosters were jettisoned and the rocket quickly faded from view.
Once on station 22,300 miles above the equator, the Defense Support Program - DSP - satellite will aim a heat-sensitive infrared telescope on the planet below to look for the tell-tale signs of an enemy rocket launch. This is the 20th DSP satellite to be launched.
The most powerful unmanned rocket in the U.S. inventory, the Lockheed Martin Titan 4B system has had mixed success in recent years with three out of the last four missions ending in failure, including the last launch of a DSP satellite. That spacecraft was stranded in a useless orbit when the two stages of its inertial upper stage booster failed to separate properly. While Air Force managers said they were confident the Titan 4B-29 vehicle launched Monday was in good shape, the road to liftoff was rocky.
During installation of the rocket's protective nose cone fairing, oil dripped from an overhead crane, raising concern the DSP satellite could have been contaminated. As it turned out, the spacecraft was undamaged and the launch team pressed ahead for a planned February launch. But engineers then ran into possible problems with the rocket's hydraulic actuators, the devices that push and pull a rocket nozzle for steering. Seven such actuators had to be removed and replaced.
As if all of that wasn't enough, engineers then had to replace electronic components in systems used to ignite and control the Titan's two solid-fuel boosters. But during a weekend news conference, program managers said they were confident the hardware would work as advertised.
"We are very confident in the hardware, we have an outstanding team, we have done an awful lot of work and we have really put every single issue under a magnifying glass much more so than ever before," said Air Force mission director Col. Mike Dunn.
"People forget there still is a little bit of rocket science here," Dunn said. "The machines are very, very complex. They take an enormous amount of will power to put these things together and get them launched successfully. Everyone on the team is sharply foused on mission success...There is absolutely nothing else that I could think of that we could have done. I would be deeply disappointed if we don't have mission success, but I see absolutely no reason why we shouldn't. We deserve one."
Built by TRW Space and Technology Group, DSP satellites have been in service since the late 1960s as the spaceborne segment of NORAD's Tactical Warning and Attack Assessment system. Using infrared telescopes, the satellites can detect the heat produced by rocket plumes and, in the case of the new models, even the heat produced by jet aircraft engines. That data then is radioed back to