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 Following deactivation, the mobile service tower and support equipment were dismantled, and the site is no longer maintained.
Famous quotes containing the words cape, air, force, station, launch and/or complex:
“Wishing to get a better view than I had yet had of the ocean, which, we are told, covers more than two thirds of the globe, but of which a man who lives a few miles inland may never see any trace, more than of another world, I made a visit to Cape Cod.... But having come so fresh to the sea, I have got but little salted.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be written, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“In the new science of the twenty-first century, not physical force but spiritual force will lead the way. Mental and spiritual gifts will be more in demand than gifts of a physical nature. Extrasensory perception will take precedence over sensory perception. And in this sphere woman will again predominate.”
—Elizabeth Gould Davis (b. 1910)
“How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didnt love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.”
—Toni Morrison (b. 1931)
“I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is made ... and at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Young children constantly invent new explanations to account for complex processes. And since their inventions change from week to week, furnishing the correct explanation is not quite so important as conveying a willingness to discuss the subject. Become an askable parent.”
—Ruth Formanek (20th century)