Rocket launch planned for test site

Wednesday, Jan. 15, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

A U.S. Department of Energy laboratory plans to launch a rocket 70 miles across airspace controlled by the Nevada Test Site and the Air Force.

Sandia National Laboratory announced the test windows Tuesday to keep the public from harm's way, DOE spokesman Derek Scammell said.

In addition, the project will demonstrate that rockets can be launched safely from the Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, to the Tonopah Test Range in central Nevada. The Test Site is larger than the state of Rhode Island.

Finally, the test firing will provide the Department of Navy Strategic Systems Programs with detailed information related to its fuse performance.

The first rocket will fall onto a 750-foot concrete target pad on a dry lake bed about three miles wide at extremely high speed, Scammell said. The second rocket will target a soil area.

A safety buffer will run along the northern edge of the Tonopah Test Range during weekend tests scheduled between 2 and 8 a.m. Saturday and Jan. 25. The public is asked to avoid the area around Kawich foothills south of Golden Arrow and Kawich Peak from midnight to 8 a.m. during Saturday through Monday and Jan. 25-26.

The two-stage rocket measures 34 feet long by 31 inches wide. The first stage is a Thiokol XM-33 Castor I solid rocket motor with two Thiokol E1 Recruit solid rocket motors attached to the first-stage vehicle fin.

The second stage motor is a United Technology ORBUS solid rocket motor. Sandia personnel launched the rocket before from Sandia's Kauai, Hawaii, test range.

However, this will be the rocket's first launch and impact on land.

A new launch pad has been built by Bechtel Nevada in Area 26 of the Test Site, where the launcher has been mounted. A nearby building has been modified to allow assembly and testing of rocket motors and payload systems.

The site is located near the deserted old mining town of Wahmonie, which had a brief existence in 1928 and where Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory conducted Project Pluto studies from 1957 to 1961 for applying heat from nuclear reactors to ramjet engines.

Sandia has launched more than 1,500 rockets at 19 sites, many of them from the Kauai test facility in Hawaii, Johnston Atoll in the Pacific and the Tonopah Test Range.

Most of the rockets were diagnostic systems that supported the DOE's nuclear weapons development and testing program. Yet more than 30 rockets have been launched from other government agency sites.

The Test Site may also serve as a launch pad for commercial communications satellites using retrievable shuttles. Kistler Aerospace Corp., based in Seattle, plans to begin launching at the Test Site as early as 1999, if it can win approval. Kistler is headed by George Mueller, former NASA head of the manned space program, and it would be the first commercial enterprise at the Nevada Test Site. The company was founded in 1993 by Walt Kistler and Bob Citron.