Yesterday, October 31st, marked the return to flight of the Taurus booster after having been upgraded and renamed the Minotaur-C.
Minotaur-C is one of those rather unique boosters that a vast majority of people know nothing about. In the original Taurus designation, it made 9 flights between 1994 and 2011, 3 of those resulting in a launch failure. This new version is effectively the same vehicle, but with heavily improved guidance and control systems. These systems are based on those used by other members of the Minotaur rocket family, hence the name change of Taurus to Minotaur-C (for Minotaur Commercial.)
The very makeup of this launch vehicle rather odd – the base stage is based off of the Peacekeeper missile, with the upper stages being variations on those used in the Pegasus launch vehicle. In fact, what would normally be the “1st” stage (the Peacekeeper missile derived system) is actually the “zeroth” stage, with the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd stages (where applicable) maintaining the designations they had on the Pegasus system.
Is this complex or strange to you? Don’t worry, it is to me too. I mean, it makes sense, but it all is quite odd, but not too uncommon in the history of space launch vehicles.
This launch, for specifics, happened at Vandenberg Air Force Base as all Taurus / Minotaur-C launches have. It carried 6 SkySat and 4 Flock-3m satellites into a polar orbit on a rather uneventful, but quite beautiful launch.
This booster, like other “legacy” rockets, is a side effect of what happens when the technology designed for nuclear war is re-purposed for good – in this case, Earth observation satellites that can help track changes in the environment, as well as just show us in continually improving detail just what our world really looks like from above in detail. Good stuff, I’d say!
Enjoy the launch footage below. I’ve linked to the Orbital ATK post containing the full launch video, but if you would like to just “get to the action” another video starting from just before launch is featured at the end of the article.
Did you miss our live #MinotaurC broadcast yesterday? You can watch the replay any time on our @YouTube channel https://t.co/CXUk90nual
— Orbital ATK (@OrbitalATK) November 1, 2017