Friday - July 29, 2011

Prang!

Ah, that explains it. It wasn’t an accidental launch after all, just one that screwed up.

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. – An unarmed Minuteman 3 intercontinental ballistic missile was destroyed over the Pacific Ocean early Wednesday, minutes after it blasted out of a California coast underground silo on a flight to test the weapon’s reliability, the Air Force said.

It’s the second Minuteman 3 test problem in five weeks at Vandenberg Air Force Base, located about 130 miles northwest of Los Angeles. The latest Minuteman 3 missile was launched at 3:01 a.m. Wednesday and was destroyed five minutes later because of unspecified safety concerns. Designed to carry a nuclear warhead, the three-stage intercontinental ballistic missile has a range of more than 6,000 miles. It travels to approximately 15,000 mph at an altitude of 700 miles.

Air Force controllers detected “a flight anomaly and terminated the flight for safety reasons,” said Col. Matthew Carroll, chief of safety for Vandenberg’s 30th Space Wing. “Established parameters were exceeded and controllers sent destruct commands,” Carroll said in a statement. “When terminated, the vehicle was in the broad ocean area northeast of Roi-Namur.” Roi-Namur is an island in the northern part of the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, some 4,200 miles from Vandenberg.

There were no details on what went wrong and a Vandenberg spokesman said there won’t be any further information until Thursday. The Air Force said there will be an investigation.

Don’t you just love Mil-Speak? “Established parameters were exceeded” means “our rocket lost control and went spinning across the sky”. That’s what is called a prang.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/29/2011 at 11:19 AM   
Filed Under: • Military •  
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