The Honolulu Star-Advertiser reports (http://bit.ly/1OoaULq ) the Air Force confirmed the failure of the Super Strypi rocket at Kauai’s Pacific Missile Range Facility on Tuesday.
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A spectator video appears to show an in-flight breakup of the rocket about a minute after blastoff.
In 2013, SLU launched its “Cooper” satellite into space after winning a competition jointly administered by the U.S. Air Force and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and other groups.
The ORS missions are aimed at testing out smaller, alternative launch vehicles, to see if they can get government satellites into space for much lower costs and with much shorter planning times.
The payload development and project management of the rail launcher and launch pad was the responsibility of UH. The primary HiakaSat payload was built by UH’s faculty and students. “Hiaka” means “to recite legends or fabulous stories” in Hawaiian, the university said. “The University of Hawaii has been critical to bringing this capability to fruition”.
Tuesday’s launch marked the first from the U.S. Navy facility and the first from Hawaii.
According to Spaceflightnow.com, the almost 17-meter-long rocket with a diameter of 79 centimeters was launched as part of an experimental test flight of a new military lightweight satellite booster, supposed to deliver to lower orbit a HiakaSat satellite and 12 or more nano satellites.
The Pentagon is seeking methods of rapidly replenishing satellites as countries such as China develop anti-satellite weapons systems. More recently, the satellite launch was set for Thursday, then Friday and Monday before today’s launch.
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Super Strypi is a bigger version of a Sandia-developed Strypi suborbital “sounding” rocket design from 1962 used for research and launched from Kauai at least as far back as 1995. “You are going to be able to tell things like weather, ocean temperatures; you are going to be able to discriminate things like lava flows on volcanoes and things and that’s what we’re really interested in – the environmental effects of different things going on in the planet”, Luke Flynn, University of Hawaii’s Hawaii Space Flight Laboratory director, said in an interview with the Garden Island.
