errr...never saw this pic before!
errr...never saw this pic before!
that's the place!! only I saw it from the train,got some pic's too, around here someplace.
SLC-6 was first developed to launch giant Titan IIIM rockets with Air Force crews and Manned Orbiting Laboratory space stations. MOL was canceled in 1969 and the facility was completed and then mothballed, remaining unused for more than a decade. In the late 1970s, the Air Force prepared to convert the facility to launch Space Shuttles on classified missions to place reconnaissance satellites in polar orbits. The extensive construction plans brought considerable protests from local Chumash Native American activists, who believe that stretch of the coast is sacred and the gateway to the afterlife. SLC-6 became the most massive construction project on the base. Large mobile structures were erected to enclose the Shuttle on its launch pad. Shuttle and payload processing buildings, a seaport and a lengthened runway were also constructed. But SLC-6 soon ran into numerous technical and schedule problems amid allegations of drug use among the construction crews and shoddy workmanship. The first Vandenberg Space Shuttle launch was scheduled for 1986, but after the Challenger disaster the facility was placed in hibernation and then closed again, after the expenditure of billions of dollars. Rumors persisted that the site had been cursed by the Indians, but it had actually been cursed by poor planning and bad workmanship. Despite the expenditure of many billions of dollars, not a single rocket was launched from SLC-6 until 1995, when a small Athena rocket lifted off from a corner of the mothballed facility. It, and another rocket launched in 1997, failed to achieve orbit, but a third Athena launch in 1999, carrying the Ikonos-1 commercial imagery satellite, was successful. SLC-6 has been converted to a launch facility for Delta IV rockets.