Unmanned NASA Rocket Lifts Off From Wallops Island, On Way To Moon 56
A moon-bound NASA rocket was launched successfully Friday evening from Virginia's Wallops Island. The launch was visible over a wide stretch of the east coast; YouTube videos are beginning to show up. The robotic probe, to study lunar dust, is the first rocket launched into outer space from the Virginia launch site.
Where's the shortcut for undoing laziness (Score:5, Informative)
How about linking to NASA's video of it [youtube.com]?
Not the First Launch from this Site (Score:4, Informative)
It would help if sometimes some basic fact checking [wikipedia.org] went into summaries. Of course how often are Slashdot summaries even remotely accurate?
The Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport has been used for other launches, but admittedly they have all been either sub-orbital sounding rockets or orbital spacecraft. This is the first "deep space" mission to fly out of this particular spaceport... so I suppose there is a "first" in there somewhere.
I'll also admit that it is nice to see some success from companies other than SpaceX. Kudos on the part of Orbital Sciences for getting this flight to work.... and to get the spacecraft to the Moon. It also doesn't hurt that the launch could be seen by a million or so people due to the proximity of the launch site to Washington DC & Baltimore.