Inside Elon Musk’s SpaceX launch of secretive US probe for ‘classified mission’

SPACEX on Wednesday launched a US government spy satellite into orbit on a highly classified mission.

The National Reconnaissance Office probe lifted off at 12:27 p.m. local time from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.

AFPA bird flies by as a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a NRO spy satellites lifts off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Wednesday[/caption]

The launch was webcast until the spacecraft’s first stage completed its burn and separated from the second stage.

Under NRO rules, coverage of the continuation of the flight – which was carrying the satellite NROL-87 – to orbit ended at that point.

The Falcon’s first stage flew back to the seaside base northwest of Los Angeles and landed so that it can be reused in a future NRO mission.

Central Coast residents were advised by SpaceX – billionaire Elon Musk’s private rocket firm – to expect sonic booms as the booster returned.

The NRO only described the NROL-87 satellite as a national security payload.

Its launch was one of three awarded by the Air Force to SpaceX in 2019 for a combined fixed price of $297million.

The NRO is the government agency in charge of developing, building, launching and maintaining U.S. surveillance satellites.

Those probes provide intelligence data to senior policymakers, the intelligence community and the Defense Department.

The office plans more than a half-dozen launches this year to place nearly a dozen payloads into orbit.

There were two NRO launches last year, NROL-82 from Vandenberg and NROL-111 from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

The NRO has launched 16 other satellites over the past two years.

It comes just days after online space junk trackers warned that a SpaceX booster is on a collision course with the Moon.

The out-of-control booster was launched from Florida in February 2015 as part of the rocket firm’s first deep-space mission.

the Falcon 9 second stage completed a long burn of its engines before deploying the NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory on a journey to a point more than 1 million km from Earth.

It did not have enough fuel left to take it back into Earth’s atmosphere, leaving it on a chaotic orbit around our planet.

Now, space trackers have calculated that the rocket part’s will intersect with the Moon at 2.58 kilometres per second within weeks.

The impact is estimated to occur on March 4, 2022, according to Bill Gray, who writes the popular Project Pluto software to track near-Earth objects.

AFPThe rocket’s reusable first stage returns to land in California[/caption]

In other news, a four-tonne chunk of a SpaceX rocket is on a collision course with the Moon, according to online space junk trackers.

Boeing has sunk $450million into a flying taxi startup that hopes to whisk passengers across cities by the end of the decade.

Personalised smart guns, which can be fired only by verified users, may finally become available to U.S. consumers this year.

And, scientists are embarking on a mission to unravel the mystery behind dozens of grisly child mummies buried in an underground tomb in Sicily.

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