Titan IIIE-Centaur

node · earth

The launch vehicle that put both Voyagers on their Jupiter trajectories: a Titan III core with two large solid rocket boosters and a Centaur upper stage burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The Centaur is the part that mattered — a high-energy upper stage was what made a direct injection towards Jupiter possible with a payload of this size, and it was the only such stage available to the United States in 1977. The vehicle flew only a handful of times and was retired at the end of the decade. Voyager 2's launch was not clean: the vehicle performed, but the spacecraft's own fault-protection software misread the launch environment and had to be recovered by the flight team in the first days of the mission.

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