It reached Mach 4.8 in less than half a minute powered by a solid rocket booster.
Iraq is also believed to be capable of manufacturing solid rocket fuel.
The space shuttle uses ATK's four-segment solid rocket boosters (SRBs) to do the major part of lifting the shuttle stack off the Earth.
They worked for Morton Thiokol (now ATK Thiokol), the Utah-based NASA contractor which produced the solid rocket motors that lifted space shuttles from their launch pads.
Seventy-three seconds into the flight, as the spacecraft began an expected roll, the forces on the solid rocket motors began to pull one of them apart.
Three years later during STS-27, Atlantis' heat shield sustained severe damage from a piece of insulation that broke off of the right solid rocket booster during launch.
ENGADGET: Space Shuttle Atlantis ends its run of predicting disaster for other NASA shuttles
Way back in November of 1985, on just its second mission, Atlantis experienced a blow-back of hot gases past the primary O-rings in one of its solid rocket boosters, resulting in serious erosion of said O-ring.
ENGADGET: Space Shuttle Atlantis ends its run of predicting disaster for other NASA shuttles
It's almost the same mix as in the solid-rocket boosters on the Space Shuttle, and it's powerful stuff.
As a solid-fuel rocket, this could be fired at short notice from mobile launchers.
As a result, real concerns are beginning to be expressed about the viability of the U.S. industrial base for solid-fuel rocket motors.
Among those items reportedly slated for decontrol are sensors capable of testing missile silos, high-speed microprocessors with a wide variety of applications for military systems, solid and liquid rocket motors and spacecraft, advanced lasers, electronic navigation equipment, and sophisticated machine tools.
The bottom part of the proposed Liberty rocket would be based on the solid-fuelled boosters that help get the shuttle off the ground.
The term hybrid is used because this type of rocket motor uses neither all-liquid fuel nor all-solid fuel, but a combination of both.
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