Launch Complex 11 (LC-11) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, is a launch complex used by Atlas missiles between 1958 and 1964. It is the southernmost of the launch pads known as missile row. When it was built, it, along with complexes 12, 13 and 14, featured a more robust design than many contemporary pads, due to the greater power of the Atlas compared to other rockets of the time. It was larger, and featured a 6 metres (20 ft) tall concrete launch pedestal, and a reinforced blockhouse. The rockets were delivered to the launch pad by a ramp on the southwest side of the launch pedestal.
Thirty-two Atlas B, D, E and F missiles were launched on suborbital test flights from LC-11. The first launch to use the complex was Atlas 3B, the first full-duration flight of an Atlas B, which was launched on 19 July 1958. In addition to the suborbital tests, one orbital launch was conducted from the complex. On 18 November 1958, Atlas 10B launched SCORE, the world's first communications satellite into low Earth orbit.
Following the end of Atlas testing at Cape Canaveral, LC-11 was the only one of the four Atlas pads not to be reused by the Atlas-Agena, and hence was first of the four pads to be deactivated. Following deactivation, the mobile service tower and support equipment were dismantled, and the site is no longer maintained.
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“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—George Lucas (b. 1944)
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Thro’ worlds unnumber’d tho’ the God be known,
‘Tis ours to trace him only in our own.
”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
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