Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) is an installation of the United States Air Force Space Command's 45th Space Wing.
The John C. Stennis Space Center (SSC) is a NASA rocket testing facility. It is located in Hancock County, Mississippi, on the banks of the Pearl River at the Mississippi–Louisiana border. As of 2012, it is NASA's largest rocket engine test facility. There are over 30 local, state, national, international, private, and public companies and agencies using SSC for their rocket testing facilities.
Little Joe II was an American rocket used from 1963–1966 for five unmanned tests of the Apollo spacecraft launch escape system (LES), and to verify the performance of the command module parachute recovery system in abort mode. It was named after a similar rocket designed for the same function in Project Mercury. Launched from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, it was the smallest of four launch rockets used in the Apollo program.
Little Joe was an unmanned United States solid-fueled booster rocket used for eight launches from 1959–1960 from Wallops Island, Virginia to test the launch escape system and heat shield for Project Mercury capsules, as well as the name given to the test program using the booster. The first rocket designed solely for manned spacecraft qualifications, Little Joe was also one of the pioneer operational launch vehicles using the rocket cluster principle.
The Luigi Broglio Space Center (BSC) is an Italian-owned spaceport near Malindi, Kenya, named after its founder and Italian space pioneer Luigi Broglio. Developed in the 1960s through a partnership between the Sapienza University of Rome's Aerospace Research Centre and NASA, the BSC served as a spaceport for the launch of both Italian and international satellites (1967–1988). The center comprises a main offshore launch site, known as the San Marco platform, as well as two secondary control platforms and a communications ground station on the mainland.
Salto di Quirra is a restricted weapons testing range and rocket launching site near Perdasdefogu on Sardinia.
It is the largest military range in Italy, composed of 12000 hectares of land owned by the Italian Ministry of Defence and one of the largest in operation within the European Union. Birth defects and cancer in the area have been blamed on weaponry used at the site.
The Poker Flat Research Range (PFRR) is a launch facility and rocket range for sounding rockets in the U.S. state of Alaska. The world's largest land-based rocket range, it is on a 5,132-acre (20.77 km2) site about 30 miles (50 km) northeast of Fairbanks and 1.5 degrees south of the Arctic Circle. More than 1,700 launches have been conducted at the range to study the Earth's atmosphere and the interaction between the atmosphere and the space environment. Areas studied at PFRR include the aurora, plasma physics, the ozone layer, solar proton events, Earth's magnetic field, and ultraviolet radiation. Rockets launched at PFRR have attained an apogee of 930 miles (1,500 km).
Amateur rocketry, sometimes known as experimental rocketry or amateur experimental rocketry, is a hobby in which participants experiment with fuels and make their own rocket motors, launching a wide variety of types and sizes of rockets. Amateur rocketeers have been responsible for significant research into hybrid rocket motors, and have built and flown a variety of solid, liquid, and hybrid propellant motors.
The Eastern Range (ER) is an American rocket range that supports missile and rocket launches from the two major launch heads located at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Florida. The range has also supported Ariane launches from the Guiana Space Centre as well as launches from the Wallops Flight Facility and other lead ranges. The range also uses instrumentation operated by NASA at Wallops and KSC.
The Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) is a commercial space launch facility located at the southern tip of NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island in Virginia, just east of the Delmarva Peninsula and south of Chincoteague, Virginia, United States.
Space Launch Complex 20 (SLC-20), previously designated Launch Complex 20 (LC-20), is a launch site at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. SLC-20 is located at the northern terminus of ICBM Road, between Space Launch Complex 19 and Space Launch Complex 34.
The Wallops Flight Facility Visitor Center is located in Building J-17, Wallops Island, Virginia, United States along Route 175. It contains exhibits highlighting past missions conducted at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility. The visitor center also provides information about current activities at Wallops Flight Facility, such as the sounding rocket, balloon and aircraft program. The outside grounds has a rocket garden consisting of rockets and aircraft used for space and aeronautical research, including a full-scale four stage reentry vehicle used to study the Earth's atmosphere. In addition, the visitor center has educational programs on Earth and space science. It is also a viewing area for rocket launches.
A number of Suborbital spaceflights were conducted during 2008. These consist mostly of sounding rocket missions and missile tests, and include other flights such as an ASAT firing. Between the start of the year and 16 July, at least 43 publicly announced suborbital spaceflights were conducted, the first of them on 11 January.
Launch Pad 0, Pad 0 or LP-0, also known as Launch Complex 0, Launch Area 0 or LA-0, is a launch complex at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island, Virginia in the United States. MARS is located adjacent to NASA's Wallops Flight Facility (WFF), which ran the launch complex until 2003. WFF continues to provide various support services to MARS launches under contract with the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Stargazer, registration number N140SC, is a Lockheed L-1011 TriStar built in 1974, that was modified in 1994 to be used by Orbital Sciences as a mother ship launch pad for Pegasus rockets. As of December 2016, 43 rockets have been launched from it, using the Pegasus-H and Pegasus-XL configurations.
The Nike Smoke was a sounding rocket, part of a research project on the behavior of the horizontal winds in the upper atmosphere, developed by NASA in the 1960s based on the Nike booster. The goal was to obtain more accurate data on the behavior of these winds in order to guide the design of new vehicles.
Cygnus CRS Orb-3, also known as Orbital Sciences CRS Flight 3 or Orbital 3, was an attempted flight of Cygnus, an automated cargo spacecraft developed by United States-based company Orbital Sciences, on 28 October 2014. The mission was intended to launch at 6:22 PM that evening. This flight, which would have been its fourth to the International Space Station and the fifth of an Antares launch vehicle, resulted in the Antares rocket exploding seconds after liftoff.
