CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- An $800 million military communications platform was safely delivered into Earth orbit Tuesday riding atop the United States' most powerful space launch vehicle.
Liftoff of the Air Force Titan 4B rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station came at 9:43 a.m. EDT (1343 GMT), two days after an initial launch attempt was scrubbed due to a variety of range and technical concerns.
With those issues resolved, and the launch pad replenished with supplies of propellant, officials pressed on with a second try on Tuesday.
Although Central Florida skies looked threatening as the launch time grew close, the combined Air Force and Lockheed Martin launch team were able to send the 194-foot-tall (59-meter-tall) rocket aloft before the weather closed in.
Climbing first through a low deck of clouds and then briefly reappearing before cruising through a high overcast layer and vanishing from view, the Titan 4B followed its ascent profile without incident.
Tucked inside the $461 million launcher's payload fairing was Milstar, a 10,000-pound (4,536-kilogram) platform designed to provide the military with secure, jam-proof communications throughout the battlefield.
"Milstar is really the Fed Ex of telecommunications. If you have to get a message through, Milstar is your choice," said Christine Anderson, Milstar system program director at the Space and Missile Systems Center in Los Angeles.
With this successful launch, the Milstar constellation is now complete, officials said.
This Milstar joins four others in orbit, providing an additional 192 channels at a low data rate and another 32 channels at what's called a medium data rate. (A sixth Milstar launched in April 1999 was lost when its upper stage failed.)
The difference between speeds is that at the low rate a typical air tasking order takes about an hour to transmit, while at the medium rate the same order takes only six seconds, Anderson said.
The Milstar program was initiated in 1981 as a $42 billion "doomsday messenger" intended to provide the Pentagon with a survivable worldwide communications capability in the event of a six-month nuclear war.
As originally conceived, Milstar was to consist of 20 nuclear-hardened communication satellites, ground-based control stations and a variety of satellite terminals for the Army, Navy and Air Force.
As the Berlin Wall crumbled and the Soviet Union dissolved, Congressional leaders began to reevaluate the primary nuclear-related mission of the Milstar program and found a system with inadequate capabilities to support conventional forces.
Skeptics called Milstar "a relic of the Cold War with negligible benefits."
Eventually the Milstar program was reduced in scope and its primary function changed, giving the U.S. the constellation it now has: two Milstar 1 spacecraft and three Milstar 2 spacecraft -- the last of which included the medium data rate capability.
The best estimates on Milstar's overall costs now is about $18 billion -- and that doesn't include the fact that the total outlay for a decade of Milstar development expenses from 1983 to 1992 remains a military secret.
Looking ahead, the Defense Department has initiated an Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellite communications program to replace Milstar, with the first launch planned for 2006.
And like Milstar, the AEHF program underwent changes.
The original plan of building five AEHF satellites at a cost of about $2.5 billion now has become a two-satellite-project costing at least $4.3 billion, according to published reports.
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