[TreeDoc]

I don't know if many are interested in this kind of stuff but it's cool to watch. Yesterday at 1104 hrs the last of the Titan Rockets was launched from Vandenberg AFB SLC-4E. As the crow flies the launch complex is about 25 nm due south of my house. I snapped a couple pics of the rocket, the first about 20 seconds into launch and the second about 3 minutes after launch just after the first stage separation. By then the rocket was well down range but you could see the separation and the falling boosters through the binocs. It's pretty cool. The rocket is invisible by the time we hear the sound.

This puppy had some spy satellite under the hood belonging to the NRO and I'm pretty confident it was put into a polar orbit hence the reason they shot if from the west coast. We see launches every couple a few months but they are generally classified so you don't know when they will happen. They pull the MX missles out of their silos back in Nebraska, Dakotas, etc, and send them out here to shoot to make sure they are fully functional and can hit their target when called upon. The MX's get shot at the Kwajalein Islands in the South Pacific were they drop their payload of Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicles (MIRV's) some 4500 miles south. It takes them a whole 20 minutes to do that!