13.07.2018

The U.S. Air Force on Thursday demolished towers once used to assemble Delta 2 rockets at Cape Canaveral for missions to Mars, four dozen flights to deploy the GPS navigation network, and numerous launches with scientific, commercial and military payloads.

With the push of a button from Brig. Gen. Wayne Monteith, commander of the Air Force’s 45th Space Wing, the demolition occurred just after 7 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT) Thursday at the Complex 17 launch pad, where twin mobile gantries and fixed towers were toppled by explosives.

Located near the southern perimeter of the sprawling Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Complex 17 is one of the Florida spaceport’s oldest launch pads, where 325 Thor and Delta boosters departed on missile tests and satellite deliveries from 1957 through 2011.

But the Delta 2 rocket which once launched from Complex 17 is nearing retirement. The Delta 2 last flew from Cape Canaveral on Sept. 10, 2011, with a pair of science probes to study the moon’s gravity field, and just one more Delta 2 launcher is left to fly in September from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.

Built more than six decades ago at the dawn of Space Age, the twin launch pads at Complex 17 — known as pads 17A and 17B — hosted the launch of 48 Global Positioning Navigation satellites, propelling the space-based network from a military-only program to an everyday public utility.

NASA’s first three Mars rovers — Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity — all departed from Complex 17 on Delta 2 rockets, along with MESSENGER mission which became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Dawn mission to the asteroid belt, the planet-hunting Kepler observatory, several weather satellites, and dozens of commercial and military communications spacecraft.

Construction of Complex 17 began in April 1956 for the Thor ballistic missile program. The first Thor launch from pad 17B occurred in January 1957, followed the debut launch from pad 17A in August of the same year.

Delta rockets based on the Thor missile design started launching from Complex 17 in the 1960s, and management of the facility transferred between the Air Force and NASA several times over the following decades.

Meanwhile, the builders of the Delta rocket family changed names through multiple corporate mergers and acquisitions, beginning with the Douglas Aircraft Company, then succeeded by McDonnell Douglas, Boeing and United Launch Alliance, formed in 2006 by the marriage of Boeing and Lockheed Martin rocket programs.

Workers raised the height of the twin mobile towers at Complex 17 in the 1980s for the Delta 2 rocket, a workhorse launcher that has accomplished 154 missions since its maiden flight from Complex 17 on Valentine’s Day 1989. The Delta 2 has logged 152 successful missions in that time.

One of the Delta 2 failures in January 1997 littered Complex 17 with huge chunks of flaming debris after the rocket exploded 13 seconds after liftoff, destroying cars and office trailers near the launch pad’s blockhouse bunker, where more than 70 launch controllers escaped uninjured.

The launch towers sustained only light damage during the Delta 2 explosion, and flights from Complex 17 resumed four months later following repairs and an investigation into the accident. When the Delta 2 returned to service, members of the launch team moved to a control center farther from the launch pad.

Three liftoffs of Delta 3 rockets, a hybrid between the Delta 2 and the Delta 4 launchers, also occurred at pad 17B from 1998 through 2000.

Engineers have fond memories of launches at Complex 17, where 110 Delta 2 rockets left Earth until the facility was deactivated.

“Growing up on Delta 2, it was mostly a fairly confined team of a couple hundred folks down at Complex 17, a smaller team out west (at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California),” said Tim Dunn, a NASA launch director who served on the Delta 2 launch team at Boeing in the late 1990s before joining the space agency.

Dunn’s first mission as launch director was the last Delta 2 flight from Cape Canaveral in 2011.

“That one was very special,” he told Spaceflight Now in an interview.

Dunn worked on the Air Force’s Titan 4 rocket before moving to the Delta 2, a less expensive vehicle that could carry to space a fraction of the Titan 4’s lift capacity, but which ended up flying more often, and for more years.

“I went to the Delta 2, and it was a little smaller,” Dunn recalled in an interview with Spaceflight Now on the Delta 2’s coming retirement. “You could get your hands around the systems, and you could walk the tower a lot more easily, and the team that you were working with was kind of an order of magnitude smaller, so that made it feel more like family. That’s one of the things that I’ll miss.

“When you grow up and you invest so many years in a particular rocket, you really feel like you know it inside and out,” he said.

Since the final Delta 2 flight from Florida, crews have secured and removed ground equipment from Complex 17, ensured the area was clear of hazardous materials, and demolished the blockhouse in 2013.

NASA took control of Complex 17 after the Air Force launched its last Delta 2 mission from pad 17A in 2009, and the space agency kept launch pad 17B operational long enough to dispatch the GRAIL lunar probes to the moon in 2011.

Dunn said NASA and the Air Force completed their “closeout” of Complex 17 in 2016. Then attention turned to demolishing the launch pad’s towers, which the Air Force put off due to funding shortages.

The mobile towers at each Complex 17 launch pad provided protection of Delta 2 rockets and their payloads from the Florida weather, and gave workers access to the vehicle during assembly and launch preparations. The gantries were retracted away from the rocket during Delta 2 countdowns.

The fixed towers provided umbilical connections to Delta 2 rockets before liftoff.

Moon Express, a private firm developing a commercial lunar lander, has leased facilities from the Air Force at Complex 17 and neighboring Complex 18 for testing of its spacecraft. But the company does not need the Delta 2-era launch pad towers.

Monteith, the 45th Space Wing commander, said the demolition Thursday was an opportunity for new growth and innovation at the Florida launch base.

“This launch complex has seen 325 launches, almost 10 percent of all launches at the Cape,” he said. “Everything from Explorer, to the Mars rovers, to GPS, to include one of our most spectacur launch failures … We’re part of a learning organization driving to the future, and this is about innovation as this launch complex is now repurposed from Delta to Moon Express.”

In a tweet Wednesday, Moon Express chief executive and co-founder Bob Richards said future testing of the company’s lunar lander will take place at Complex 18.

“Personally, I love the towers and find them inspiring. The demo of the towers was pre-ordained when we licensed LC-17 & 18 from the USAF due to safety & other factors that require them to come down,” Richards wrote. “Our test activities will be taking place at LC-18.”

“For more than half a century, the twin towers of SLC-17 stood tall on the horizon of the Cape Canaveral Spaceport,” said Frank DiBello, president and CEO of Space Florida, a state agency charged with attracting aerospace businesses to Florida. “Together, they’ve hosted more than 300 launches and often marked the direction in which launch viewers would turn to witness history in the making.

“Tomorrow, those towers will be demolished,” DiBello said in a statement Wednesday. “That detonation will symbolize the ongoing renaissance and evolution of the Cape Canaveral Spaceport as we continue to transition further into the planet’s primary hub for commercial space activity. We look forward to making even more history with the latest tenant, Moon Express, and our other partners in building the bold new future of the commercial space marketplace.”

Quelle: SN

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The towers of Launch Complex 17 pads A and B crashing down at Cape Canaveral AFS in Florida on July 12, 2018. Photo Credit: Mike Killian / AmericaSpace.com

After first echoing to the roar of rocket engines in 1957—before the Space Age even began—historic Space Launch Complex (SLC)-17 near the southern end of Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., breathed its last earlier today (Thursday, 12 July), when shortly after 7:00 a.m. EDT its two nearly 200-foot-tall gantries were remotely destroyed. Brig. Gen. Wayne Monteith, commander of the Air Force’s 45th Space Wing, initiated detonations of 68 pounds of explosives which brought SLC-17A and SLC 17B to the ground after a combined 325 launches in more than five decades of active service. During their storied careers, the two pads hosted the first successful low-orbiting weather satellite, Britain’s maiden satellite, the world’s earliest communications satellites, GPS satellites, as well as NASA space telescopes and Mars Rovers.

Built at a reported cost of $3.5 million per complex, SLC-17 arose in April 1956, with an intention that they would support the Air Force’s PGM-17 Thor ballistic missile. Construction was completed the following November and SLC-17B saw its first launch in January 1957, followed by the inaugural use of its twin the following August. Unfortunately, these two opening launches of the Thor ended in failure, but success lay just around the corner. In their first years of service, the pads saw the launch of Pioneer 5, which explored the interplanetary environment between Earth and Venus for the first time, and might have seen the United States’ first voyages to the Moon, had three other Pioneers not been lost during ascent from August-November 1958.

A test Thor takes flight from Launch Complex 17 at Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Dec. 5, 1959. (U.S. Air Force photo)

During the first half of the sixties, the pads saw a multitude of Thor test-flights and pioneering orbital missions. Tiros-1, the world’s first successful low-orbiting weather satellite, was lofted in April 1960 and provided the first accurate meteorological forecasts using space-based data. A month later, Echo-1 became the earliest passive communications satellite, whilst Telstar-1 in July 1962 enabled the first live broadcast of television images between the United States and continental Europe from space. The first successful communications satellite to enter geostationary orbit, Syncom-3, flew in July 1964, whilst the commercial Intelsat-1—the famed “Early Bird”—launched a few months later in April 1965 and helped provide live television coverage of the splashdown of Gemini VI-A the following December.

Britain’s first satellite, Ariel-1, flew from the 17A pad in April 1962, and the UK Ministry of Defence saw its first Skynet military communications satellites lofted in November 1969 and August 1970. Dovetailed into these missions were members of the United States’ fleet of Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO) and Orbiting Geophysical Observatory (OGO) spacecraft.

ABOVE: Watch our unique beachside view of the pad implosions! Credits: Jeff Seibert / Mike Killian for AmericaSpace

Throughout the 1970s, a series of Intelsat communications satellites, Explorer science satellites, Canada’s first Anik communications satellite, Nimbus and the earliest members of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) program were placed into orbit. SLC-17’s first launch of the eighties came on 14 February 1980, when NASA’s Solar Maximum Mission (SMM)—which was subsequently retrieved and repaired by the Space Shuttle—was delivered to space on an ambitious mission to explore the Sun. Nine years later, in February 1989, the Delta II booster saw its first flight off 17A and the first Block II Navstar Global Positioning System (GPS) was put into space.

Its final two decades saw a mixture of communications, navigational and military satellites, as well as a range of scientific missions for NASA and its international partners. Astronomical observatories including the German-led ROSAT, the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (EUVE), the Geotail magnetospheric science mission, the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTS) and the Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) featured heavily in the first half of the 1990s, whilst the second half and beyond saw 17A and 17B with Mars acutely in their sights.

The Global Surveyor and Pathfinder missions rocketed away from the two pads during the November-December 1996 Martian “launch window”, whilst the Climate Orbiter and Polar Lander did likewise in the December 1998-January 1999 window. Mars Odyssey was launched in April 2001, NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers rose from 17A and 17B in June-July 2003 and, most recently, the Phoenix mission flew in August 2007.

The final launch to fly out of Launch Complex 17, NASA’s GRAIL mission to the moon in 2011 atop a ULA Delta-II rocket. Photo Credit: Mike Killian / AmericaSpace

Still others have included the Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) mission to Mercury in August 2004, the Dawn spacecraft to Vesta and Ceres, the Spitzer Space Telescope—the fourth and final member of NASA’s fleet of Great Observatories—and Kepler in March 2009. Two years after Kepler, in September 2011, SLC-17B saw the complex’s final mission with the launch of the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) flight to the Moon.

Plans for today’s implosions began soon after the GRAIL mission launched in 2011, and cost upwards of $2 million. Now, Launch Complex 17 is occupied by the private company Moon Express for developing and testing engines and lunar landers. No rockets, however, will be launching from LC-17 again, Moon Express will instead launch their robotic explorers on rockets from other Cape pads.

 

BELOW: Images from this morning’s implosion, with thanks to FiredUpFishingCharters in Port Canaveral for taking us out for a sweet beachside view of the implosions, check them out on Facebook too HERE!

 

Photos Credit: Mike Killian for AmericaSpace.com, all rights reserved.

 

The towers of Launch Complex 17 pads A and B crashing down at Cape Canaveral AFS in Florida on July 12, 2018. Photo Credit: Mike Killian / AmericaSpace.com

Quelle:AmericaSpace