Launch Group At KSC Tallies Remarkable Record

The failed launch last week of a Taurus rocket was a first for NASA's Launch Services Program, which has chalked up a remarkable record of successful launches in the past decade.

Formed in 1998 as part of an agency-wide consolidation, the group tallied an admirable 56 consecutive successful launches between its inaugural launch of Deep Space-1 in October 1998 and the Feb. 9 launch of a national polar-orbiting weather satellite for the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration.

NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory was lost last Tuesday after a Taurus XL rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California failed in flight. Data telemetered back to Earth during the flight indicated the rocket's payload fairing failed to separate. The rocket crashed into Antarctic seas.

The LSP is based at Kennedy Space Center and manages launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Other launch locations include NASA's Wallops Island flight facility in Virginia, the North Pacific's Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and Kodiak Island in Alaska.

The group has lofted a host of historic missions, including the Mars Spirit and Opportunity rovers, the Lunar Prospector and the Cassini mission to Saturn as well as the Stardust, Genesis and Deep Space missions.

Check out the 1998-2008 record here: LSPLaunchList.pdf. Here's a NASA Fact Sheet that describes the group in detail: LSP.pdf

NASA since 1990 has been procuring launch services from the commercial sector, but up until 1998, management oversight for Expendable Launch Vehicle launch services was performed at two other NASA field centers.

Delta rocket launches were managed by Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio (now known as the Glenn Research Center) managed Atlas rocket missions.

The management oversight for all NASA Expendable Launch Vehicle missions was consolidated at Kennedy Space Center in 1998 as part of an agency reorganization that was ordered up by then-NASA Administrator Dan Goldin.

Steve Francois is the head of the LSP at KSC. Omar Baez and Chuck Dovale are launch directors for the LSP.

ABOUT THE IMAGE: Click to enlarge and save the NASA photo of a Delta II rocket blasting off from Launch Complex 17-B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station with the Dawn spacecraft, appropriately, just after sunrise on Sept. 27, 2007. You can also click the enlarged image to get an even bigger, more detailed view. Dawn set sail that day on a 1.7-billion-mile journey through the inner solar system to orbit and study a pair of asteroids. The spacecraft will be the first to orbit two planetary bodies, asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres, during a single mission. Vesta and Ceres lie in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It is also NASA's first purely scientific mission powered by three solar electric ion propulsion engines. Photo credit: NASA/Tony Gray & Robert Murray.