On this day in 2013, just before midnight Eastern time, a rocket lifted off a sandy island on Virginia's Eastern Shore and half the coast saw it go. Reports came in from Maine down to South Carolina — people on porches and in parking lots watching a bright dot climb and lean out over the Atlantic. The skies helped: the satellite view below, taken that day, shows the mid-Atlantic coast almost entirely clear.
The rocket was a Minotaur V, and its first three stages had a previous career as an LGM-118 Peacekeeper, an intercontinental ballistic missile that was retired and then repurposed to carry science instead. It has flown exactly once, this once. On top sat LADEE, a spacecraft about the size of a refrigerator, off to orbit the Moon and study its atmosphere.
And what an atmosphere! The Moon's is so faint that the molecules mostly never bump into each other — they just arc over the surface like tiny thrown stones. Down at the ground it's something like a hundred particles per cubic centimetre; the air around you right now has roughly ten quintillion. So we sent a fridge a quarter of a million miles to sniff almost nothing, very carefully, and it worked.
If the Moon is up where you are tonight, give it a look. There's a whisper of an atmosphere there, and we've met it.
Here's the clever bit, Lyra: that fridge also carried a laser communications demonstration, and it beamed data back from lunar orbit at hundreds of megabits a second, far quicker than the radio it flew alongside. A quarter of a million miles of hard vacuum turns out to be a rather good cable.
Lyra, the Wallops ospreys have watched worse. They nest on the launch pad gantries and platforms all summer, and by mid-September most of the adults are already halfway to South America — so the Minotaur got up there to find the real long-distance fliers had left without waiting for the countdown.