Towers Toppled at Historic Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 17

The service towers at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Launch Complex 17 in Florida are seen being toppled on July 12, 2018.

By Robert Pearlman

The last two launch towers to stand at Cape Canaveral since the dawn of the Space Age are no more.

The twin mobile gantries at Launch Complex 17 (LC-17) were imploded Thursday morning (July 12), toppling the oldest remaining launch pad structures at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The United States Air Force's 45th Space Wing oversaw the demolition, which leveled the landmark towers just after 7 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT).

"3... 2... 1... Fire in the hole!" announced Brig. Gen. Wayne Monteith, commander of the 45th Space Wing, before pushing a button to initiate a series of detonations. Seconds later, the towers fell over, kicking up a cloud of dust in their wake. [NASA's 10 Greatest Science Missions]

"It is part of history, which we are doing every single day out here on the range," said Monteith, per a video recorded by Florida Today, the local area's newspaper.

The 62-year-old mobile service towers supported 325 missile and rocket launches, including those of some of the United States' most notable satellites and robotic spacecraft.

The gantries, which were part of a two-pad complex sharing a single blockhouse, were originally erected in 1956 for the U.S. Air Force's Thor Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) research and development program. Pad 17B hosted its first Thor missile test in January 1957. Pad 17A entered service eight months later.

The twin launch pads at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's LC-17 as seen prior to a Delta II rocket launch in 1997.

The United States' first attempts at sending living organisms — mice — into space lifted off from LC-17 on upgraded Thor-Able launch vehicles in 1958. That same year, the complex supported the country's first attempts at sending probes to orbit the moon.

The first satellite to transmit pictures of Earth from orbit, Explorer 6, was launched on a Thor-Able rocket from Pad 17A in August 1959.

In the early 1960s, the complex underwent its first of several modifications in order to support larger launch vehicles.

The first weather satellite (TIROS-1) and the first passive communications satellite (ECHO-1) both launched from Pad 17A in 1960. The first active communications satellite, Telstar-1, which provided the first live trans-Atlantic television broadcast, lifted off on a Thor-Delta rocket from Pad 17B in 1962.

Syncom 2 and 3, the world's first geosynchronous and geostationary satellites, respectively, were launched on Delta rockets from Pad 17A in 1963 and 1964.

From 1965, Complex 17 continued to support Delta launches under control by NASA. With the introduction of the Delta II expendable launch system in 1988, LC-17 was returned to Air Force supervision.

The Delta II opened a new chapter in space history for the towers at Complex 17, as they were raised even higher to support the taller rocket.

Beginning with its maiden flight from Pad 17A, the Delta II was used to launch 48 GPS (global positioning system) satellites. For NASA, the Delta II became a chariot into the solar system, with LC-17 serving as the opening to that pathway.

The space agency's first Mars rovers, Pathfinder and the twins Spirit and Opportunity, lifted off on Delta II rockets from Complex 17, as did the Mars Phoenix lander and the orbiters 2001 Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor.

NASA's Dawn and NEAR asteroid missions launched from 17B. Deep Impact, which slammed a probe into a comet's nucleus in 2005, began from the same site.

The Spitzer Space Telescope and Kepler space observatory both launched from Pad 17B. The first spacecraft to enter orbit around planet Mercury, MESSENGER, left Earth from 17B as well.

Ultimately, the decision to retire the Delta II meant an end for the gantry towers at Complex 17. (The last Delta II launch is scheduled to take place from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in September.)

The last launch from Launch Complex 17A was a GPS satellite atop a Delta II in August 2009. The final launch from 17B came two years later in September 2011 with NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL lunar probes.

Now, with the six-decade-old towers removed, Complex 17 will continue on as a test bed for commercial lunar landers. Cape Canaveral-based Moon Express has leased the site to build and test its moon-bound robotic spacecraft.

"This is about innovation as this launch complex is repurposed from Delta to Moon Express," said Monteith.

The 2017 Canadian UFO Survey (PDF Link)

A full list of 2017 UFO sightings can be found here.

UFOs: The Greatest Story Never Told

By Cheryl Costa

People ask me all the time why the government won’t come clean about UFOs and perhaps the ET presence. After all, based on a 2012 National Geographic poll, 80 percent of Americans think the government is not being square with the American people.

After the Dec. 16, 2017, New York Times and Politico revelation that the Pentagon had a formal program for monitoring UFOs with regard to military bases and fleet operations, the story took the news media by storm. There was a major news cycle about the Pentagon effort, the congressional folks who got them the money and the videos that were released.

A lot of UFO disclosure activists hailed Dec. 16 as the starting point for a new era of openness and expected an information avalanche about all things UFO. It just didn’t happen.

I’m still waiting for the offices of New York’s U.S. senators, Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, to answer my correspondence. It has been more than a year.

But the real problem with UFO and ET disclosure in America is with the Fourth Estate, a.k.a. the Media.

The talking heads on some of America’s most popular daytime programs and news talk networks were unprepared for that Dec. 16 story. They seemed to be at a loss to discuss the topic intelligently, as they stumbled for words to express their thoughts. Most of them were barely grasping the context and implications.

Most defaulted to “Little Green Talk.” When asked their opinion whether there was alien life, more than a dozen news hosts either said “no” or simply took the safe ground with comments like, “Oh, I suspect there is bacterial life out there somewhere.” Nobody on any of these programs wanted to be the newsperson who believes in little green men.

But there is another very painful and telling reality: News producers and their on-camera broadcasters really didn’t want to talk about the UFO subject beyond the immediate story about the Pentagon’s Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP).

On May 30, The Washington Post published a story with the headline: “UFOs are suddenly a serious news story. You can thank the guy from Blink-182 for that.”

A week or so later on June 5 my New York Skies blog featured the headline, “Close encounters with UFOs are getting harder to find.” In that article, I pointed out that after crunching 2016 and 2017 sightings data, UFO sightings are falling off for some unexplained reason.

On June 6, Fox News picked up on the article and gave it an even broader readership. I was encouraged that perhaps some regional media outlets would be as open-minded.

After crunching the new 2016 and 2017 sighting numbers, I decided to see if UFOs were a hot news story at the local level. In the new data, New York state had moved from the sixth position to fourth in the United States for UFO sighting reports. Now that’s newsworthy. I have also cleaned up the data to the point that I can drill down to any state and county to reveal the local municipalities within that county.

So who knew that Buffalo and Erie County both ranked No. 3 within New York state? Erie County was also in the Top 100 counties for UFO sightings of more than 3,000 counties in the United States. I pitched this newsworthy story to Buffalo’s ABC affiliate WKBW, as well as the NBC affiliate WGRZ and their Fox outlet WUTV. I was met with silence.

Rochester turned out to be the No. 4 city in New York state and Monroe County ranked No. 5. Monroe also ranked nationally in the Top 100 counties. I pitched the idea to the news director at ABC affiliate WHAM; he snickered and said he’d present it to his editorial team. Silence. I reached out to WUHF and presented a similar pitch. Silence.

A UFO research colleague gave me a contact at Albany’s Fox affiliate, where I reached out to that newsroom. Silence. Albany is the No. 7 city in New York, while Albany County ranks No. 13.

I pitched to Binghamton’s CBS affiliate WBNG. Silence. I spoke to a newsroom person at Fox affiliate WICZ and made my pitch about the standings of Binghamton (ranked No. 9) and Broome County (16). I was asked to email them the facts of the pitch. Silence.

At one television station, I took a different approach. I called the marketing and sales department and explained the significant demographics related to audience interest, especially with Sweeps Week coming up. I suggested that a locally flavored UFO story would be excellent for the ratings. The nice marketing lady was interested and had their news team call me. When I gave them the same pitch, I was greeted with silence.

I had a better reception with Syracuse’s regional ABC affiliate WSYR and with the news team at Charter Communications on Spectrum Cable. Syracuse is No. 5 in the state and Onondaga County is No. 8 in the state for sightings as well as in the top 200 of more than 3,000 national counties.

So, if you are not hearing about UFOs from your local television or radio news team, it’s because they either all bought into the notion that UFOs are the topic matter of kooks and crackpots. The other consideration is stigma: None of them wants to do a story where they might be labeled as “that UFO news director or news reporter.”

Nevertheless, two-thirds of Americans (220 million) think the government is not being honest with its citizens with regard to UFOs and the ET presence.