A towering Air Force Titan 34D carrying a secret Pentagon payload blasted off with a ground-shaking roar Monday and thundered toward space in the 15th and final flight for the workhorse military booster.
The unmanned Titan 34D, being replaced by more powerful Titan 4 rockets, took off in clear skies at 1:54 a.m. EDT after a secret countdown and quickly climbed away from launch complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.Visible from beaches and the nearby Kennedy Space Center, the 1.5 million-pound rocket, the last Titan 34D left in the Air Force inventory, majestically arced east over the Atlantic Ocean trailing a brilliant orange and red stream of flame from its two 90-foot-long solid-fuel boosters.
"A milestone in the U.S. military space program was reached today with the successful launch of the last Titan 34D space launch vehicle," an Air Force statement said. "The booster carried a classified military payload into orbit."
Slightly less than two minutes after blastoff, the rocket's two 10-foot-wide strap-on boosters were jettisoned as planned and the two-stage liquid-fueled Titan core vehicle continued its ascent, quickly fading from view.
"Everything is on track and the missile is performing nicely," Lt. Col. Ron Rand, an Air Force spokesman, said as the rocket hurtled into the night sky.
As usual with such "secret" launches, dozens of reporters were standing by, alerted by various sources and Coast Guard alerts notifying boaters of an offshore "launch danger zone" where debris from the rocket's first stage fell.
It was the sixth launch of a Titan 34D since back-to-back failures in 1985 and 1986, the year of the Challenger disaster, and the first since a successful flight May 10, 1988, from Cape Canaveral.
The most recent previous Titan 34D launched from Florida on Sept. 2, 1988, also was a success in terms of rocket performance, but the booster's spy-satellite payload was damaged when the nose cone shell hit the spacecraft after the shell was jettisoned during ascent.
The payload carried by the Titan launched Monday was classified. A pair of Defense Satellite Communications System - DSCS - radio relay stations were known to be awaiting launch at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and it had been believed they were assigned to the last Titan 34D.
Some experts, however, believed the payload was replaced with a spy satellite in recent weeks, but that could not be confirmed.
DSCS satellites require an inertial upper stage booster for the final push to "geosynchronous" orbit 22,300 miles above the equator where it takes 24 hours to complete one revolution around the planet. In such orbits, satellites appear to hang stationary in the sky and thus can provide uninterrupted service over a given hemisphere.