Renaming A Rocket To Get A 100% Success Rate
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Orbital ATK Successfully Launches Minotaur C Rocket Carrying 10 Spacecraft to Orbit for Planet
“Orbital ATK … announced its commercial Minotaur C rocket successfully launched 10 commercial spacecraft into orbit for Planet. The Minotaur C launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.”
Minotaur-C, Wikipedia
“Minotaur-C (Minotaur Commercial), formerly known as Taurus … Three of four launches between 2001 and 2011 ended in failure.”
That bare-bones pad looks like something that Goddard would use. Aside from the bird, of course 🙂
https://assets.cdn.spacefli…
Wow, that is really minimalist. I had no idea that a facility that simple existed at Vandenberg.
Reminds me of old photos and film footage when they launched Thor and Atlas rockets from south Pacific islands (including nuclear bombs to explode at extreme altitudes). Those pads were minimal compared to what we typically see at Cape Canaveral. Is is a way to cut costs or perhaps not such a good idea, that is, additional equipment for preparation and monitoring is not that much more? Losing a payload on the pad more costly?
The bare bones launch from any where gimmik is how they got military funding this vehicle is also used in icbm interceptor programs.
#rocketwashing
To be fair aside from the faulty fairing the rest of taurus technically worked, and minatour-c is taurus with a fairing lifted from the minatour family(and minatour avionics because taurus avionics are out of production)
What should really screw those reliably marketing numbers though is that the skinny part of the rocket is basically Pegasus which doesn’t have the same stellar success rate :p
To be fair to OATK, it’s the other way around. Taurus XL was failure-prone, they grafted on a bunch of Minotaur-based avionics, and now its better. So Minotaur has a 100% success rate, to the point of even saving other rocket designs.
The Taurus launch stand is right next to LC-567E, an abandoned Atlas F elevator silo. In the 23 years since it was built, it has hosted only 11 launches.