The U.S. military will test launch an unarmed Minuteman III missile before dawn on Thursday from Vandenberg Air Force Base, 160 miles northwest of Santa Ana. If skies are clear, the rocket’s contrail will likely be visible. The launch is currently scheduled to occur during a six hour window that begins at 3 a.m. Thursday. From Orange County, rocket watchers should look to the northwest, or toward the Palos Verdes Peninsula, to pick up the contrail.

Spacearchive.info, the most authoritative website of Vandenberg launches, says, “The vehicle is scheduled to lift-off from its silo during a 03:00- 09:00 PDT launch window and send one unarmed Mk-21 reentry vehicle (warhead) on a ballistic trajectory. The impact area in southwest of Guam in a U.S. Navy test range. Glory Trip 19.”

Key parts of the rocket’s guidance system were developed at Boeing-Anaheim.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 7:51 am and is filed under Ain't that interesting?, California science and environment news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.