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Fnord666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

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.

Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/01/13/delta-4-rocket-successfully-lofts-clandestine-nro-satellite-into-orbit/ [spaceflightnow.com]

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