Department of the Air Force Report, 1996

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D.5 Thor Launch and Performance History (Not Including Delta)
The entire Thor history is depicted rather compactly in bar-graph form in Figure 40.
The solid-black portion of each bar indicates the number of launches during the
calendar year for which vehicle performance was entirely normal, in so far as could be
determined. The clear white parts forming the tops of most bars show the number of
launches that were either failures or flights wher~ the launch vehicle experienced some
sort of anomalous behavior. Every launch with an entry in the response mode column
of Table 46 falls in this category. Such behavior did not necessarily prevent the
attainment of some, or even all, mission objectives.
35 .-------......----,---.----,.--,--...--_____,
30
m 25
C
0
·en
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~ 20
5 ...
0 55
60
65
70
75
80
85
90
95
Launch Year
Figure 40. Thor Launch Summary
D.5.1 Thor and Thor-Boosted Launch History
The data in Table 46 summarize all Thor and Thor-boosted space-vehicle launches since
the program began. A launch sequence number is provided in the first column. A
launch ID and date are provided in-columns 2 and 3. The fourth column indicates the
vehicle configuration. The fifth column indicates the launch range. The sixth column
indicates the failure-response mode (1 through 5 and NA) that RTI has determined best
describes the failures that occurred. For Mode 3 or 4 failures, a suffix of 'T' indicates
the vehicle tumbled.
Successful launches are indicated by a blank in the Response-
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