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What caught my eye initially was the unusual track of the flight path.
A United Launch Alliance Delta 4 rocket climbed into orbit Friday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California with a top secret spy satellite, adding a new set of eyes in the sky for the U.S. government's intelligence community and nudging part of the Delta 4 family closer to retirement.
The 217-foot-tall (66-meter) Delta 4 rocket lifted off at 2:11 p.m. PST (5:11 p.m. EST; 2211 GMT) from Space Launch Complex 6 at Vandenberg on the power of an Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-68A main engine and two Orbital ATK-built solid rocket boosters.
[...] ULA confirmed the flight's successful outcome in a press release around two hours after liftoff.
[...] "It's a classified payload for the NRO," Varghese said in a pre-launch interview. "We can't go into the details of what the payload does, but it's a national security priority, and it's mission will ensure that the warfighters across the globe have the appropriate intel that they need to be able to support operations."
Codenamed NROL-47, the satellite lofted Friday will likely join the NRO's fleet of orbiting radar reconnaissance stations.
The Delta 4's trajectory toward the southwest suggested it was bound for an unusual high-inclination retrograde orbit that would allow the rocket's top secret payload to travel in the opposite direction of Earth's rotation.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday January 16 2018, @08:58PM (5 children)
Best part about the NROL missions are the launch patches. Pretty generic if you ask me, white knight, bad red dragon, latin phrase (mali nunquam praevalebunt, evil never prevails or something like that). Still nothing that comes close to NROL 39.
http://www.americaspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/nrol47patchnro.png [americaspace.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2018, @09:31PM
Shit like that happens when people spend too much time in front of their [N|W]intedo.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday January 16 2018, @09:58PM (1 child)
A patch for each launch? Come on!
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday January 16 2018, @10:40PM
They need better patches, so they stop ripping open at Max-Q.
Note that it's a lot easier to get the Agile standup meeting focused when the lady is already reading the countdown.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @09:09AM (1 child)
ULA has a different patch, with a shark. https://picclick.com/Nrol-47-30-Sw-Ula-Delta-Iv-4-D-Mission-273022667913.html [picclick.com]
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday January 17 2018, @03:40PM
That is a bit odd, they seem to have different once for different things. This, the link, seems to be some sort of textile patch for the uniform and the one I linked was the one they had painted onto the rocket. So I guess they differentiate between mission patch and launch patch or something and it's just me being sloppy and using the words willy nilly.