The Titan IV-B rocket was launched on Saturday RELATED VIDEO Classified satellite launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base Windows Media 28K 80K

May 22, 1999
Web posted at: 5:08 p.m. EDT (2108 GMT)

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, California (CNN) -- After three previous costly failures, the U.S. Air Force finally successfully launched a Titan IV-B rocket into space early Saturday.

The rocket carried into orbit a classified spy satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office.

"We always feel relief at the point in the mission when we have a successful payload separation and the satellite gets into orbit," said Air Force Maj. John Cherry.

The Titan IV is the largest unmanned booster rocket in the U.S. space arsenal. But over the past five years, the rockets, built by Lockheed-Martin, have had what even the company's president, Peter Teets, concedes is a "disappointing track record."

Last August, a Titan IV-A blew up after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Florida, destroying a $1 billion spy satellite. Investigators blamed faulty wiring.

Then last month, two Titan IV-B launches at Cape Canaveral also failed from problems traced to the upper stage of the rocket.

Over the past nine months, six U.S. space launches using the Titan IV and other expendable rockets have ended either in destruction or with satellites stranded in useless orbits. The cost of the failures has been about $3.5 billion.

On May 19, President Bill Clinton asked Defense Secretary William Cohen to provide a report on why the rockets failed and what "actions (are) required to ensure our future access to space."

In the wake of the Titan failures, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory also delayed the launch of its Quickscat weather satellite.

"We've been held up now for six months, and the reason for that is because the launch vehicle is a Titan and has not been ready for flight," said JPL spokesman Jim Graf.

The Quickscat launch has now been reset for June -- and will be the next test for the troubled Titan.

Correspondent Jim Hill and Reuters contributed to this report.

Note: Pages will open in a new browser window

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.