The United Launch Alliance (ULA)’s powerful Delta IV Heavy rocket will fly for the second-to-last time early Wednesday morning (June 21), and you can watch the action live.
A Delta 4 Heavy is scheduled to lift off from Space Force Station Cape Canaveral in Florida on Wednesday at 3:29 AM EST (0729 GMT), on a US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) mission called NROL-68.
You can watch the launch live here at Space.com, courtesy of ULA, or directly through the company.
Related: Facts about the Delta IV Heavy
We know very little about the satellite that NROL-68 operates on. This isn’t surprising, given that it’s an NRO payload; The agency operates the United States’ fleet of spy satellites, whose capabilities and activities tend to be classified.
The NROL-68 mission patch — featuring a baby dragon, its mother, and the moon — offers some clues, though scant.
“The baby dragon signifies the birth of a new satellite system, while the moon with the silhouette of the mother dragon represents the protection of the Five Eyes community, the nation, and its allies,” the NRO officials wrote in a letter. Brief description of the task. (The Five Eyes is an alliance of the intelligence communities of the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.)
The passage along the bottom, Nusquam Cellare, It is Latin for “nowhere to hide”. “Little Dragon may be science fiction, but the impact of NROL-68 on national security is real!”
NROL-68 will be the first ULA mission in 2023 and the 15th Delta IV Heavy launch overall.
The powerful rocket is 235 feet (71.6 meters) tall and generates 2.1 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. This is a lot, but it is far from a record. For example, a NASA Space Launch System rocket that debuted on last year’s successful Artemis 1 moon mission produces 8.8 million pounds of thrust.
SpaceX’s giant Starship — the largest and most powerful rocket ever built — produces about 16.7 million pounds of thrust. But Starship has not yet flown a successful mission; It ran into some problems during its only flight so far, a test launch on April 20, and ordered SpaceX to destroy the craft high above the Gulf of Mexico.
ULA is phasing out its Delta IV Heavy and its Atlas V rocket in favor of a new Vulcan Centaur rocket, which is scheduled to launch later this year. While the Delta IV Heavy has one more mission to take on after Wednesday, however, the Atlas V will continue to fly for years to come. ULA has booked missions on the veteran rocket through 2029, mostly to build Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet constellation and send Boeing’s Starliner astronaut taxi to the International Space Station.
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