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Old 08-26-2017, 12:52 AM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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Hello All,

A Minotaur vehicle will lift off from the Cape in 16 minutes, and here's a live video feed: http://spaceflightnow.com/2017/08/2...-status-center/
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Old 08-26-2017, 02:03 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by blackshire
Hello All,

A Minotaur vehicle will lift off from the Cape in 16 minutes, and here's a live video feed: http://spaceflightnow.com/2017/08/2...-status-center/
...And it was completely successful! The Minotaur 4’s first three stages—29 year-old rocket motors from a Peacekeeper (MX) ICBM--burned in quick succession and functioned perfectly, as did the spherical fourth and fifth stage motors (which ignited after 10-minute coasting periods), injecting the ORS-5 satellite into a nearly-circular 599 km x 604 km orbit with an inclination of 0.02 degrees to the equator, from which it will watch for debris (and any unknown spacecraft that don’t belong) in the 22,300 mile-high geosynchronous orbital corridor.
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http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6126511
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Old 08-26-2017, 10:30 AM
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The Ruskies don't like the Minotaur...or more accurately, they like to use it to gripe at the USA. They claim our space boosters like the Minotaur that are derived from decommissioned ICBM's should still count as ICBM's for the arms reduction treaties.
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Old 08-27-2017, 04:29 AM
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Originally Posted by tbzep
The Ruskies don't like the Minotaur...or more accurately, they like to use it to gripe at the USA. They claim our space boosters like the Minotaur that are derived from decommissioned ICBM's should still count as ICBM's for the arms reduction treaties.
That's a laugh-and-a-half! I'm sure that the modified Minuteman silos where the Peacekeepers were based (each silo also contained a cold-launch system to "pop" the missile into the air) have either been changed back to house Minuteman IIIs, mothballed, or dismantled. We ought to complain that every one of their R-7 (SS-6 Sapwood) ICBM-based Soyuz rockets is a potential ICBM. :-) Maybe the Russians are annoyed because their own program of this type hasn't attracted a lot of business, having only seven launches (they even wanted to do the following at Alaska's Poker Flat Research Range in the late 1990s):

Their gripes are even sillier in light of this fact: They do the very same thing that we do with the Minotaur vehicles (which use Minuteman or Peacekeeper stages, depending on the Minotaur variant). Their Start-1--and the single, failed "double-second-stage" Start--launch vehicle (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Start-1 ) uses surplus stages from their solid propellant Topol ICBM, some of which were retired as per the START I treaty. (Plus, the retired Topols, being road-mobile, would be even easier to "re-assemble and re-militarize" than the retired Minuteman and/or Peacekeeper ICBMs, since the Topol TELs [Transporter-Erector-Launchers] could be quickly re-loaded with new missiles after firing their first ones, so a treaty-limited number of Topol TELs wouldn't be so limiting [I don't know if a Topol TEL could be re-loaded rapidly enough for it to matter in a nuclear war, but the capability exists nevertheless--their ballistic missile submarines also have this "fast re-load" capability].)
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Black Shire--Draft horse in human form, model rocketeer, occasional mystic, and writer, see:
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperba...an-form/8075185
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6122050
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6126511
All of my book proceeds go to the Northcote Heavy Horse Centre www.northcotehorses.com.
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