The US Air Force conducted America’s first successful intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test of the year, firing an unarmed Minuteman III from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California yesterday morning. The missile landed in the Pacific Ocean at an undisclosed location.



The test comes in the wake of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un proclaiming that his country is suspending both ICBM and nuclear tests for the foreseeable future. Kim is getting ready to meet with President Trump in the coming weeks or months. An exact date and location for the historic meeting have yet to be determined, though neutral countries like Sweden and Switzerland are high on the list of probabilities.

As the Air Force Times notes, this was the first American ICBM test since August of 2017. Another test was originally planned for February of this year but was postponed. After the last test in 2017, Air Force officials announced that the ICBM had traveled roughly 4,200 miles to land near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. No announcement was made about where this unarmed missile landed.

You can watch video of the test on YouTube:

While North Korean missile tests regularly make front page headlines in the US, American missile tests don’t receive much coverage at all. But you can bet that it gets attention in North Korea.

Kim’s meeting with Trump isn’t the only high-profile meeting that’s coming up. On Friday, Kim will walk across the line that divides North and South Korea to meet with South Korean president Moon Jae-in. And it should be an interesting preview of what’s to come when Kim and Trump finally meet face to face.

The White House has sent mixed messages in recent weeks, as President Trump often mischaracterizes Kim’s pledge to stop the country’s tests as a pledge to denuclearize. But the North Korean regime hasn’t made any such promise.



Diplomacy is good, but here’s hoping that Trump’s advisors, like the uber-hawkish John Bolton, aren’t setting the president up to fail. If Trump walks away from his meeting with Kim without a plan for complete denuclearization we can only hope that it’s not positioned by the Trump regime as a total loss. Otherwise the stalemate between North Korea and the US could turn into a very real war. John Bolton, who has openly called for a first strike against North Korea, is waiting in the wings for his chance to pounce if anything should go wrong. In the meantime, it appears the US will continue to conduct missile tests as usual.</s>The US Air Force on Wednesday test launched an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, officials said.

[WASHINGTON] The US Air Force on Wednesday test launched an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, officials said.

According to a statement from Air Force Global Strike Command, the missile took off at 5.26am (12:26 GMT) and was successful.

"A reliable test launch occurs when a test missile launches, completes its flight path within a designated safety corridor, the equipment functions properly, sensor data is collected, and the test reentry vehicle impacts where targeted," the statement read.

"Though the reentry vehicle reached its intended target, the test and analysis data is not releasable to the public."

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Officials said the test had been scheduled three to five years ago, and this is the first such launch this year.

Decades after the Cold War, the United States still fields hundreds of Minuteman III ICBMs, dotted in silos across rural America.

Over the next 20 years, the Air Force will switch out the entirety of its Minuteman III fleet with a new missile known currently known as the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD).

AFP</s>The US Air Force has reportedly carried out a test launch of a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile.

This is the first such test launch this year, with the last one being conducted in August 2017; initially, the launch was scheduled for February but was postponed.

The launch of the missile without a warhead was conducted at the Vandenberg Air Force base in California and was called successful as it managed to hit its designated target.</s>Test was an unarmed Minuteman III missile from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base to an undisclosed location in the Pacific Ocean

The U.S. Air Force launched its first intercontinental ballistic missile of the year Wednesday in a successful test of the weapons system.

 The launch, which began at 5:26 a.m. PDT, sent an unarmed Minuteman III missile from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base to an undisclosed location in the Pacific Ocean.

The Air Force says the test – the first since last August after a February launch was postponed – was aimed at verifying the readiness, effectiveness and accuracy of the system.

 The launch follows the announcement from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un earlier this month that Pyongyang would suspend its nuclear and missile tests.</s>VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP) — The U.S. Air Force has successfully launched an intercontinental ballistic missile in the latest test on the Southern California coast.

The unarmed Minuteman 3 missile was launched Wednesday morning from Vandenberg Air Force Base.

It was the first such test this year. The most recent was last August. A launch planned for February was postponed.

The Air Force says the test was to check the readiness, effectiveness and accuracy of the weapons system.

Minuteman missiles are regularly tested with launches from Vandenberg that send unarmed re-entry vehicles to a target area in the middle of the Pacific.</s>VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP) - The U.S. Air Force has successfully launched an intercontinental ballistic missile in the latest test on the Southern California coast.

The unarmed Minuteman 3 missile was launched Wednesday morning from Vandenberg Air Force Base.

It was the first such test this year. The most recent was last August. A launch planned for February was postponed.

The Air Force says the test was to check the readiness, effectiveness and accuracy of the weapons system.

Minuteman missiles are regularly tested with launches from Vandenberg that send unarmed re-entry vehicles to a target area in the middle of the Pacific.

The Washington Times is switching its third-party commenting system from Disqus to Spot.IM. You will need to either create an account with Spot.im or if you wish to use your Disqus account look under the Conversation for the link "Have a Disqus Account?". Please read our The Washington Times is switching its third-party commenting system from Disqus to Spot.IM. You will need to either create an account with Spot.im or if you wish to use your Disqus account look under the Conversation for the link "Have a Disqus Account?". Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.</s>Specialist Sychelle Gonsalves of the 49th Missile Defense Battalion Military Police is pictured at the Ft. Greely missile defense complex in Fort Greely, Alaska, U.S., April 26, 2018. REUTERS/Mark Meyer

FORT GREELY, Alaska (Reuters) - Two hours south of Fairbanks, Alaska, near the starting point of the Alaska highway, sit row upon row of missile silos embedded in the frozen ground in the shadow of snow-capped mountains.

Despite their location, far from Washington, D.C., Pyongyang, or Moscow, the 40 missiles here could one day decide the fate of millions of Americans.

The missiles and a few dozen National Guard soldiers will form the first line of defense should North Korea, or any other country, fire an intercontinental ballistic missile at the United States.

In recent months, North Korea has said it has developed a missile that can reach the United States mainland.

In a control room at Ft. Greely, just outside the small town of Delta Junction, five soldiers performed a simulation on Thursday showing reporters how they would respond to an attack.

"The first threat in the system shows an impact location of Los Angeles," said Captain Jospeh Radke, the team's battle analyst, referring to the second largest U.S. city.

"Threat in the system is showing Los Angeles, we’re going to engage at this time," said Major Terri Homestead, the crew's director.

Homestead then gave orders to the team’s weapons operator, Staff Sergeant Justin Taylor, to fire one missile from Ft. Greely and another from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

The five-person team is one of 10 units that operate the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system. They spend 60 percent to 70 percent of their working days running drills, trying to account for any possible scenario.

Soldiers such as Homestead and Radke have seen the facility take on increasing significance in global affairs in recent years, as tension with North Korea has escalated.

Most recently, U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un spent much of late 2017 and early 2018 trading threats of annihilation.

The soldiers said the high stakes are part of what makes them love the job, despite the remote location and the strain of weighing life-or-death options.

"That responsibility is what drives us," Radke told reporters. "It’s really what allows us to put in the time that we do up here. Knowing not just that you’re protecting the 300 million people in the United States, but also your family members, your friends across the United States."

The system became operational in 2004 under the direction of President George W. Bush. Now there are plans to add 20 more missiles to the 40 waiting silently just underground in Ft. Greely, with additional interceptors at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

The most recent test, in May, was successful. Colonel Kevin Kick, the commander of the 100th Missile Defense Brigade, which oversees the missile defense system, said it was constantly being improved.

"These ground-based interceptors in the system fielded right now at Ft. Greely and at Vandenberg Air Force Base are the best of what we’ve got," Kick said. "We’re ready, if called on, to respond to threats against our nation."</s></s>Ground crews at Vandenberg Air Force Base on California’s Central Coast hoisted NASA’s InSight Mars lander atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket Monday, kicking off nearly two weeks of integrated tests and checkouts before the probe’s interplanetary launch window opens May 5.

Enclosed within the Atlas 5’s metallic 13.8-foot (4.2-meter) diameter shroud, the InSight spacecraft was transferred from an Astrotech payload processing facility to Space Launch Complex 3-East at Vandenberg early Monday. A crane lifted the probe top the Atlas 5 rocket protected inside the launch pad’s mobile gantry, and technicians mated the payload on top of the Atlas 5’s Centaur upper stage.

With the addition of InSight and its aerodynamic enclosure, the Atlas 5 rocket stands 188 feet (57 meters) tall.

No photos of payload lift operation were released by NASA or ULA as of Tuesday afternoon.

The final assembly of the Atlas 5 rocket is one of the last major steps before launch. Engineers will check electrical connections between the launcher and its payload in a series of tests over the next few days, setting up for final readiness reviews next week and the start of countdown preparations the evening of Friday, May 4, with the retraction of the mobile service tower at the SLC-3E launch pad.

InSight has a two-hour launch predawn window May 5 opening at 4:05 a.m. PDT (7:05 a.m. EDT; 1105 GMT). The nearly $1 billion mission, funded primarily by NASA with contributions from France and Germany, has until June 8 to launch from Vandenberg, when the ever-changing positions of Earth and Mars in the solar system make a direct trip possible. Mars launch opportunities come once every 26 months.

The lander will arrive at Mars on Nov. 26, regardless of the launch date from May 5 through June 8.

InSight will be the first mission to another planet to launch from Vandenberg, a military base on the Pacific coast between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Vandenberg Air Force Base is typically host to launches into polar orbit, a type of orbit usually tailored for climate research missions, spy satellites and some communication applications.

NASA’s interplanetary probes are usually reserved for launches from Cape Canaveral, where rockets take off toward the east over the Atlantic Ocean for safety reasons. A launch toward the east gains an extra boost from the speed of Earth’s rotation, allowing a rocket to carry a heavier payload.

But InSight is small — it will weigh around 1,530 pounds (694 kilograms) at launch — well below the lift capability of the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, which will fly in its basic “401” configuration with a four-meter payload fairing and no solid rocket boosters.

That means the Atlas 5 will not need the extra energy imparted during an eastward launch from Cape Canaveral, and ULA and NASA agreed to launch InSight from Vandenberg. Fewer Atlas 5 missions are scheduled from Vandenberg, so officials wanted to reduce the workload at ULA’s busier launch base in Florida.

“We’re really excited,” said Lt. Col. Kenneth Decker, commander of the 4th Space Launch Squadron at Vandenberg, in an interview with Spaceflight Now earlier this year. “Since it’s not a classified mission and it’s more public, it’s fun for our squadron because we can interact a little more and share information with our families and other people.”

The 4th Space Launch Squadron provides support for ULA’s Atlas and Delta rocket missions at Vandenberg, a launch manifest that is primarily comprised of secret spy satellites for the U.S. government.

Designers based the InSight lander on NASA’s Phoenix probe, which launched in August 2007 and touched down on the northern polar plains of Mars in May 2008. Diminishing solar power and cold temperatures limited Phoenix’s lifetime to about five months — two months longer than its three-month prime mission.

InSight will head for a broad plain near the Martian equator with ample sunlight year-round. Officials selected the landing site in Elysium Planitia for its safety — there are few steep slopes or huge boulders. Bruce Banerdt, InSight’s principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, calls it “the biggest parking lot on Mars.”

A robotic arm on InSight will place a French-built seismometer on the surface of Mars near the lander, and a heat probe provided by the German space agency, DLR, will burrow up to 16 feet (5 meters) underground to measure thermal energy coming from the red planet’s interior.

Scientists will collect the seismic and thermal data to find out about the structure of Mars’s crust, mantle and core. The information will help geologists understand how rocky planets like Mars, and Earth, formed in the early solar system.

The geologic record dating back to the birth of the planets some 4.5 billion years ago has been erased on Earth.

ULA’s launch team at Vandenberg began assembling the Atlas 5 rocket on its launch pad at Vandenberg on March 3 with the stacking of the kerosene-fueled first stage booster.

The Atlas 5’s Centaur upper stage, powered by an Aerojet Rocketdyne RL10 engine, was installed on top of the first stage March 6. The Centaur engine, consuming liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, will dispatch the InSight probe with enough velocity to escape Earth’s gravity and head for Mars.

Two days later, on March 8, a boattail structure was added to the top of the Centaur stage. The boattail provides an aerodynamic and structural connection between the Centaur and the Atlas 5’s payload fairing.

A pair of CubeSats that will accompany InSight to Mars were installed on their carrier aboard the Centaur upper stage last month. The CubeSats will fly by Mars and attempt to beam telemetry from InSight back to Earth during the lander’s descent.

The launch team completed a countdown rehearsal March 22, during which the Atlas 5 was loaded with liquid propellants to simulate launch day procedures. The “wet dress rehearsal” is not part of a typical Atlas 5 launch campaign, but managers added the test to wring out any potential problems with the rocket well ahead of liftoff due to InSight’s tight interplanetary launch period.</s>NASA is going to Mars again, this time with the first spaceship dedicated to digging deep below the surface to find out what’s shaking on the red planet.

InSight is scheduled to launch May 5 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on an Atlas V 401 rocket. The launch window opens at 4:05 a.m. PT (7:05 a.m. ET).

It will be the first NASA mission launched to another planet from the West Coast, and it’ll be visible to millions in Southern California from Santa Maria to San Diego. NASA’s previous interplanetary missions were launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

If it all goes as planned, after a six-month journey, the 790-pound (358-kilogram) probe will land on November 26, joining five other NASA spacecraft operating on and above Mars.

The mission’s principal investigator, Bruce Banerdt, told CNN via email that he was “already pretty crazy about Mars” when he was 8 or so, and his excitement about sending a spacecraft there “is really starting to get intense!”

Banerdt said he thinks InSight will fill the last gaping hole in NASA’s exploration of Mars.

“We have mapped the surface of the entire planet in terms of visible features, topography, gravity and magnetic fields,” he said.

“We have studied the atmosphere, both globally and at the surface. We have roved around the surface at four different places, studying the geology and piecing together the history of the surface. But until now, the vast regions of the planet deeper than a few miles, or so, (have) been almost completely unknown to us.”

He added, “InSight will change that with a single stroke.”

InSight will help scientists draw the first detailed map of the interior of Mars, and Banerdt said it’s hard to overstate how much science that map will create.

So, how do you study a planet that’s 75 million miles (121 million kilometers) away?

InSight doesn’t have wheels, so once it lands it stays put. It can’t roll around gathering up dirt to study. But it does have a 7.8-foot-long (2.4-meter) robotic arm. The arm will place a seismometer on the ground to detect “marsquakes” (think earthquakes, but on Mars, of course).

Another instrument will dig 16 feet (5 meters) into the ground, deeper than any instrument ever sent to Mars.

The arm has a camera that will snap color 3-D images, and there’s a second camera on the spaceship’s body that will provide wide-angle views.

“The first image will be taken less than an hour after touchdown and should be available on Earth within the first day,” Banerdt said. “We should have images of the landing area within a week.”

InSight will use its radio system to measure the wobble of Mars’ north pole to help scientists learn more about the shape of the planet.

And finally, Banerdt said, InSight “will have one of the best weather stations ever placed on Mars, measuring pressure, wind and temperature around the clock for at least a Martian year.”

InSight’s primary mission is for two years, but if all goes well, Banerdt said he’ll ask for an extension.

This new NASA spaceship won’t be going alone to Mars. Two suitcase-size spacecraft will be launched on the same rocket. They will trail behind InSight and will orbit Mars as part of a NASA experiment to see whether they can be used to relay data back to Earth.

The small spacecraft, called Mars Cube One, or MarCO-A and B, “have opened up a whole new frontier for space,” chief engineer Andy Klesh told CNN. He said this mission will be a “critical test of this new type of spacecraft and how NASA might use it to explore the solar system in the future.”
The United States Air Force tests a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The missile test is considered to be successful.