Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known
Founder: Joseph Barone
Contributors: crookedindifference, bumerangue, propagandery, rocketmagic, rostenbach
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Home again: U.S. military space plane returns to Earth
Flying back to Earth after nearly 225 days in space, the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B space plane blazed through the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean Friday and swooped into a California air base under the cloak of darkness.
Capping a secret mission in orbit, the unmanned spaceship touched down at 0916 GMT (4:16 a.m. EST; 1:16 a.m. PST) on the landing strip at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.
The 15,000-foot-long runway was built to handle space shuttle landings, but Friday morning’s return was the first time Vandenberg welcomed home a spacecraft from orbit. The West Coast facility has hosted more than 1,900 launches since the late 1950s.
It was the first time a robotic U.S. vehicle autonomously returned to Earth from space to land on a runway. Only the former Soviet Union’s Buran space shuttle accomplished the feat before Friday morning.
DELTA II SCHEDULED TO LAUNCH DESPITE DELAYS
11/2/2010 - VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. — Vandenberg is scheduled to launch a Delta II rocket carrying the Thales Alenia Space-Italia COSMO-SkyMed Satellite today at 7:20 p.m. from Space Launch Complex-2 on North Vandenberg.
Friday the 13th Satellite Launch
Cape Canaveral AFS, Fla. (Aug.13, 2010) - A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with the Air Force’s Advanced Extremely High Frequency-1 (AEHF-1) satellite rolls out to its Space Launch Complex-41 launch pad arriving at 7:25 a.m. EDT today. The launch of the AEHF-1 mission is set for Saturday with a launch window of 7:07-9:06 a.m. EDT. The AEHF constellation of satellites will provide 10 times greater capacity and channel data rates six times higher than that of the existing Milstar II communications satellites.
Photo by Pat Corkery, United Launch Alliance.
Some great footage of the Boeing X-37B launch (some parts are computer simulation).
