In a related story: Way long ago we flew the SFT-2 flight for MDO before they got big and became an ‘Agency’. The payload flight test group was out at Meck Island with the bird in the hole and some on the original test & integration, et al, got to watch the flight test on a closed video feed from Vandenburg and Kwaj. Countdown went smooth until T-15 minutes when a rain squall formed off the California coast and they had to delay the launch for local weather. OK so some time passes and they restart the count. The MRLV left the silo at Vandenburg and flew a nice trajectory. Some minutes later the PLV lifted our payload (Sensor Flight Test 2) from the silo and we got our flyby data and in our 24 hour report we had selected the correct target (an RV replica) among the counter measures. (The Boeing-Rockwell sensor did not get this on the flight they flew a year earlier BTW.)
In conversing with the ground test folks who were interpreting my telemetry data they said there was a curios incident just prior to the launch of the interceptor. As it turns out one of the ‘other reasons’ the launch didn’t go as planned was that there was a Green Peace boat off the Cal coast and the Coast Guard had to run them off because they were in the area where the first stage booster would impact. THEN … here’s the kicker. While in the blockhouse on Meck Island the cameras picked up two people walking from the shore carrying a banner headed for the silo. Their timing was amazing, but with the launch delay they were premature in their arrival to protest the event. Range security fetched them and they were turned over to the authorities. The King dealt with them by holding them naked in jail for three days.
Those two idiots owe their lives to a little weather delay. Were it not for that, they would have been killed by a combination of the booster engine heat giving them 3rd degree burns (they would have been incinerated as soon as the nozzle cleared the hole), and the acoustic energy would have turned them into arthropods.
Don’t know where these two fools are but that day they got lucky. And reading the news a decade later, I see that they’ve multiplied.