The United States Space Force and a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed sent a secret reconnaissance payload into space on Tuesday (9), on a Delta IV Heavy rocket, in the last flight of a brand that dates back to the beginning of the 1960s.
Owned by United Launch Alliance (ULA), the 23-story-tall rocket lifted off from the Space Force's Cape Canaveral Station in Florida shortly before 1 p.m. (local time) under warm, partly cloudy skies.
A live ULA webcast of the liftoff showed the rocket leaving the launch tower amid a storm of flames and clouds of exhaust and water vapor.
The flight was intended to deploy a satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), a US defense intelligence agency, in a secret mission designated as NROL-70.
This is the 16th and final flight of a Delta IV Heavy and the last of any of the rockets in the Delta family, a dynasty of space launchers that originated from a modified intermediate-range ballistic missile and grew to include about two dozen variants. increasingly powerful.
Since the Thor-Delta rocket was introduced in 1960, the Delta family of launch vehicles has sent nearly 390 payloads into space, from the world's first weather and GPS satellites to NASA science missions, including eight spacecraft on trips to Mars. .
The world's first passive communications satellite, Echo 1A, and the first active communications satellite, Telstar 1, which enabled transatlantic television transmission, were launched by Thor-Delta in 1960 and 1962, respectively.
ULA, a partnership between aerospace giants Boeing and Lockheed Martin, is retiring the Delta and Atlas rockets in favor of its newly developed Vulcan rocket, which made its maiden flight in January. On that occasion, he transported a privately financed lunar landing module.
The payload malfunctioned before reaching the Moon, but the Vulcan launch from Florida was a success. The Atlas V had 17 more missions scheduled before it went out of service.
The precise nature and objective of the NROL-70 mission was kept secret.
In a vaguely worded statement before the launch, the government said the mission would “strengthen the NRO’s ability to provide a broad range of intelligence information in a timely manner to national decision makers, warfighters, and intelligence analysts.”
Source: CNN Brasil
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