Stormy weather over the launch base early Wednesday morning was clearing and conditions were expected to be acceptable for launch by the opening of the window, Air Force officials reported Wednesday morning.

The rocket, known in some circles as the Minotaur, will carry a compact collection of nearly a dozen satellites and experiments with military, university, civilian and commercial applications.

"It's not really the official name, but a lot of people associated with the program call it that," said Barry Beneski, spokesman for Orbital Sciences Corp., the company the Air Force contracted to build the new rocket.

The rocket's name couldn't be more appropriate. Named for the half-beast, half-human creature of mythology, the Minotaur rocket accurately represents civilization's animalistic and humane sides.

Thanks to the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) treaty between the United States and the former Soviet Union, some 350 Minuteman 2 nuclear-tipped missiles were retired and sit un-needed and unused at un-disclosed locations around the United States.

The Air Force, hoping to get some good use out of the hundreds of solid-fueled rocket motors laying around, contracted with Orbital Sciences to create what is officially called the Orbital-Suborbital Program Space Launch Vehicle, said Lt. Colleen Lehne, an Air Force spokeswoman with Los Angeles Air Force Base.

Orbital took the first two stages of the Minuteman 2 and stacked on top of it the upper two stages of its own, privately-developed Pegasus XL launch vehicle to create the Minotaur -- a new booster capable of lifting some 750 pounds (340 kilograms) into a polar orbit 450 miles (724 kilometers) high.

"The primary focus of this mission is to test the ability of the Minuteman 2 to be used as a space launch vehicle for delivering satellites into orbit," Lehne said.

Of course the idea of turning missiles originally designed to deliver nuclear warheads into space launch vehicles is nothing new to the Air Force. The military branch's Atlas and Titan ICBM missiles, developed in the 1950s, were adapted for use by NASA in launching astronauts on Project Mercury and Gemini.

Much later, the Atlas and Titan found use as commercial launch vehicles, with the Atlas program continuing to evolve into larger, more modern and more capable rockets used for carrying military and commercial cargo into orbit.

Minotaur is making history because it combines a military ballistic missile with parts of a Pegasus rocket, which is already in the history books as the first commercial space launch vehicle to be developed from the outset with exclusively private funding.