title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had a far greater and more constructive influence on Wundt's psychology, philosophy, epistemology and ethics. This can be gleaned from Wundt's Leibniz publication (1917) and from his central terms and principles, but has since received almost no attention. Wundt gave up his plans for a biography of Leibniz, but praised Leibniz's thinking on the two-hundredth anniversary of his death in 1916. He did, however, disagree with Leibniz's monadology as well as theories on the mathematisation of the world by removing the domain of the mind from this view. Leibniz developed a new concept of the soul through his discussion on substance and actuality, on dynamic spiritual change, and on the correspondence between body and soul (parallelism). Wundt "secularised" such guiding principles and reformulated important philosophical positions of Leibniz away from belief in God as the creator and belief in an immortal soul. Wundt gained important ideas and exploited them in an original way in his principles and methodology of empirical psychology: the principle of actuality, psychophysical parallelism, combination of causal and teleological analysis, apperception theory, the psychology of "striving", i.e. volition and voluntary tendency, principles of epistemology and the perspectivism of thought. Wundt's differentiation between the "natural causality" of neurophysiology and the "mental causality" of psychology (the intellect), is a direct rendering from Leibniz's epistemology.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: Wundt devised the term psychophysical parallelism and meant thereby two fundamentally different ways of considering the postulated psychophysical unit, not just two views in the sense of Fechner's theory of identity. Wundt derived the co-ordinated consideration of natural causality and mental causality from Leibniz's differentiation between causality and teleology (principle of sufficient reason). The psychological and physiological statements exist in two categorically different reference systems; the main categories are to be emphasised in order to prevent category mistakes. With his epistemology of mental causality, he differed from contemporary authors who also advocated the position of parallelism. Wundt had developed the first genuine epistemology and methodology of empirical psychology.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: Wundt shaped the term apperception, introduced by Leibniz, into an experimental psychologically based apperception psychology that included neuropsychological modelling. When Leibniz differentiates between two fundamental functions, perception and striving, this approach can be recognised in Wundt's motivation theory. The central theme of "unity in the manifold" (unitas in multitudine) also originates from Leibniz, who has influenced the current understanding of perspectivism and viewpoint dependency. Wundt characterised this style of thought in a way that also applied for him: "…the principle of the equality of viewpoints that supplement one another" plays a significant role in his thinking – viewpoints that "supplement one another, while also being able to appear as opposites that only resolve themselves when considered more deeply."


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: Unlike the great majority of contemporary and current authors in psychology, Wundt laid out the philosophical and methodological positions of his work clearly. Wundt was against the founding empirical psychology on a (metaphysical or structural) principle of soul as in Christian belief in an immortal soul or in a philosophy that argues "substance"-ontologically. Wundt's position was decisively rejected by several Christianity-oriented psychologists and philosophers as a "psychology without soul", although he did not use this formulation from Friedrich Lange (1866), who was his predecessor in Zürich from 1870 to 1872. Wundt's guiding principle was the development theory of the mind. Wundt's ethics also led to polemical critiques due to his renunciation of an ultimate transcendental basis of ethics (God, the Absolute). Wundt's evolutionism was also criticised for its claim that ethical norms had been culturally changed in the course of human intellectual development.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: Wundt's autobiography and his inaugural lectures in Zurich and Leipzig as well as his commemorative speeches for Fechner and his Essay on Leibniz provide an insight into the history of Wundt's education and the contemporary flows and intellectual controversies in the second half of the 19th century. Wundt primarily refers to Leibniz and Kant, more indirectly to Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Arthur Schopenhauer; and to Johann Friedrich Herbart, Gustav Theodor Fechner and Hermann Lotze regarding psychology. In addition to John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume and John Stuart Mill, one finds Francis Bacon, Charles Darwin and Charles Spencer, as well as French thinkers such as Auguste Comte and Hippolyte Taine, all of whom are more rarely quoted by Wundt.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: Wundt distanced himself from the metaphysical term soul and from theories about its structure and properties, as posited by Herbart, Lotze and Fechner. Wundt followed Kant and warned against a primarily metaphysically founded, philosophically deduced psychology: "where one notices the author's metaphysical point-of-view in the treatment of every problem then an unconditional empirical science is no longer involved – but a metaphysical theory intended to serve as an exemplification of experience."


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: He is, however, convinced that every single science contains general prerequisites of a philosophical nature. "All psychological investigation extrapolates from metaphysical presuppositions." Epistemology was to help sciences find out about, clarify or supplement their metaphysical aspects and as far as possible free themselves of them. Psychology and the other sciences always rely on the help of philosophy here, and particularly on logic and epistemology, otherwise only an immanent philosophy, i.e. metaphysical assumptions of an unsystematic nature, would form in the individual sciences. Wundt is decidedly against the segregation of philosophy. He is concerned about psychologists bringing their own personal metaphysical convictions into psychology and that these presumptions would no longer be exposed to epistemological criticism. "Therefore nobody would suffer more from such a segregation than the psychologists themselves and, through them, psychology." "Nothing would promote the degeneration [of psychology] to a mere craftsmanship more than its segregation from philosophy."


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: Wundt claimed that philosophy as a general science has the task of "uniting to become a consistent system through the general knowledge acquired via the individual sciences." Human rationality strives for a uniform, i.e. non-contradictory, explanatory principle for being and consciousness, for an ultimate reasoning for ethics, and for a philosophical world basis. "Metaphysics is the same attempt to gain a binding world view, as a component of individual knowledge, on the basis of the entire scientific awareness of an age or particularly prominent content." Wundt was convinced that empirical psychology also contributed fundamental knowledge on the understanding of humans – for anthropology and ethics – beyond its narrow scientific field. Starting from the active and creative-synthetic apperception processes of consciousness, Wundt considered that the unifying function was to be found in volitional processes and the conscious setting of objectives and subsequent activities. "There is simply nothing more to a man that he can entirely call his own – except for his will." One can detect a "voluntaristic tendency" in Wundt's theory of motivation, in contrast to the currently widespread cognitivism (intellectualism). Wundt extrapolated this empirically founded volitional psychology to a metaphysical voluntarism. He demands, however, that the empirical-psychological and derived metaphysical voluntarism are kept apart from one another and firmly maintained that his empirical psychology was created independently of the various teachings of metaphysics.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: Wundt interpreted intellectual-cultural progress and biological evolution as a general process of development whereby, however, he did not want to follow the abstract ideas of entelechy, vitalism, animism, and by no means Schopenhauer's volitional metaphysics. He believed that the source of dynamic development was to be found in the most elementary expressions of life, in reflexive and instinctive behaviour, and constructed a continuum of attentive and apperceptive processes, volitional or selective acts, up to social activities and ethical decisions. At the end of this rational idea he recognised a practical ideal: the idea of humanity as the highest yardstick of our actions and that the overall course of human history can be understood with regard to the ideal of humanity.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: Parallel to Wundt's work on cultural psychology he wrote his much-read "Ethik" (1886, 3rd ed. in 2 Vols., 1903), whose introduction stressed how important development considerations are in order to grasp religion, customs and morality. Wundt considered the questions of ethics to be closely linked with the empirical psychology of motivated acts "Psychology has been such an important introduction for me, and such an indispensable aid for the investigation of ethics, that I do not understand how one could do without it." Wundt sees two paths: the anthropological examination of the facts of a moral life (in the sense of cultural psychology) and the scientific reflection on the concepts of morals. The derived principles are to be examined in a variety of areas: the family, society, the state, education, etc. In his discussion on free will (as an attempt to mediate between determinism and indeterminism) he categorically distinguishes between two perspectives: there is indeed a natural causality of brain processes, though conscious processes are not determined by an intelligible, but by the empirical character of humans – volitional acts are subject to the principles of mental causality. "When a man only follows inner causality he acts freely in an ethical sense, which is partly determined by his original disposition and partly by the development of his character."


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: On the one hand, Ethics is a normative discipline while, on the other hand, these 'rules' change, as can be seen from the empirical examination of culture-related morality. Wundt's ethics can, put simply, be interpreted as an attempt to mediate between Kant's apriorism and empiricism. Moral rules are the legislative results of a universal intellectual development, but are neither rigidly defined nor do they simply follow changing life conditions. Individualism and utilitarianism are strictly rejected. In his view, only the universal intellectual life can be considered to be an end in itself. Wundt also spoke on the idea of humanity in ethics, on human rights and human duties in his speech as Rector of Leipzig University in 1889 on the centenary of the French Revolution.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: Wundt divided up his three-volume "Logik" into General logic and epistemology, Logic of the exact sciences, and Logic of the humanities. While logic, the doctrine of categories, and other principles were discussed by Wundt in a traditional manner, they were also considered from the point of view of development theory of the human intellect, i.e. in accordance with the psychology of thought. The subsequent equitable description of the special principles of the natural sciences and the humanities enabled Wundt to create a new epistemology. The ideas that remain current include epistemology and the methodology of psychology: the tasks and directions of psychology, the methods of interpretation and comparison, as well as psychological experimentation.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: The list of works at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science includes a total of 589 German and foreign-language editions for the period from 1853 to 1950 MPI für Wissenschaftsgeschichte: "Werkverzeichnis Wilhelm Wundt".The American psychologist Edwin Boring counted 494 publications by Wundt (excluding pure reprints but with revised editions) that are, on average, 110 pages long and amount to a total of 53,735 pages. Thus Wundt published an average of seven works per year over a period of 68 years and wrote or revised an average of 2.2 pages per day. There is as yet no annotated edition of the essential writings, nor does a complete edition of Wundt's major works exist, apart from more-or-less suitable scans or digitalisations.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: Apart from his library and his correspondence, Wundt's extraordinarily extensive written inheritance also includes many extracts, manuscripts, lecture notes and other materials Wundt's written inheritance in Leipzig consists of 5,576 documents, mainly letters, and was digitalised by the Leipzig University Library. The catalogue is available at the "Kalliope online portal".


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: One-third of Wundt's own library was left to his children Eleonore and Max Wundt; most of the works were sold during the times of need after the First World War to Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. The university's stock consists of 6,762 volumes in western languages (including bound periodicals) as well as 9,098 special print runs and brochures from the original Wundt Library. The list in the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science only mentions 575 of these entries. Tübingen University Archive's stock includes copies of 613 letters, Wundt's will, lists from Wundt's original library, and other materials and 'Wundtiana': The German Historical Museum in Berlin has a 1918 shellac disk on which Wundt repeats the closing words of his inaugural lecture (given in Zürich on 31 October 1874 and re-read in 1918 for documentation purposes): "On the task of philosophy in the present"


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: The last Wundt biography which tried to represent both Wundt's psychology and his philosophy was by Eisler (1902). One can also get an idea of Wundt's thoughts from his autobiography "Erlebtes und Erkanntes" (1920). Later biographies by Nef (1923) and Petersen (1925) up to Arnold in 1980 restrict themselves primarily to the psychology "or" the philosophy. Eleonore Wundt's (1928) knowledgeable but short biography of her father exceeds many others' efforts.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: At the start of the First World War, Wundt, like Edmund Husserl and Max Planck, signed the patriotic call to arms as did about 4,000 professors and lecturers in Germany, and during the following years he wrote several political speeches and essays that were also characterized by the feeling of a superiority of German science and culture.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: During Wundt's early Heidelberg time he espoused liberal views. He co-founded the Association of German Workers' Associations. He was a member of the liberal Progressive Party of Baden. From 1866 to 1869 he represented Heidelberg in the Baden States Assembly.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: In old age Wundt appeared to become more conservative (see Wundt, 1920; Wundt's correspondence), then – also in response to World War I, the subsequent social unrest and the severe revolutionary events of the post-war period – adopted an attitude that was patriotic and lent towards nationalism.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: Wilhelm Wundt's son, philosopher Max Wundt, had an even more clearly intense, somewhat nationalist, stance. Although not a member of the Nazi party (NSDAP), Max Wundt wrote about national traditions and race in philosophical thinking.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: The "Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie" German Society for Psychology grants a Wilhelm-Wundt Medal.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: The psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin described the pioneering spirit at the new Leipzig Institute in this fashion: "We felt that we were trailblazers entering virgin territory, like creators of a science with undreamt-of prospects. Wundt spent several afternoons every week in his adjacent modest Professorial office, came to see us, advised us and often got involved in the experiments; he was also available to us at any time."


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: The philosopher Rudolf Eisler considered Wundt's approach as follows: "A major advantage of Wundt's philosophy is that it neither consciously nor unconsciously takes metaphysics back to its beginnings, but strictly distinguishes between empirical-scientific and epistemological-metaphysical approaches, and considers each point-of-view in isolation in its relative legitimacy before finally producing a uniform world view. Wundt always differentiates between the physical-physiological and the purely psychological, and then again from the philosophical point-of-view. As a result, apparent 'contradictions' are created for those who do not observe more precisely and who constantly forget that the differences in results are only due to the approach and not the laws of reality ..." Traugott Oesterreich (1923/1951) wrote an unusually detailed description of Wundt's work in his Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie (Foundations of the History of Philosophy). This knowledgeable representation examines Wundt's main topics, views and scientific activities and exceeds the generally much briefer Wundt reception within the field of psychology, in which many of the important prerequisites and references are ignored right from the start.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: The internal consistency of Wundt's work from 1862 to 1920, between the main works and within the reworked editions, has repeatedly been discussed and been subject to differing assessments in parts. One could not say that the scientific conception of psychology underwent a fundamental revision of principal ideas and central postulates, though there was gradual development and a change in emphasis. One could consider Wundt's gradual concurrence with Kant's position, that conscious processes are not measurable on the basis of self-observation and cannot be mathematically formulated, to be a major divergence. Wundt, however, never claimed that psychology could be advanced through experiment and measurement alone, but had already stressed in 1862 that the development history of the mind and comparative psychology should provide some assistance.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: While the "Principles of physiological Psychology" met with worldwide resonance, Wundt's cultural psychology (ethno-psychology) appeared to have had a less widespread impact. But there are indications that George Herbert Mead and Franz Boas, among others, were influenced by it. In his Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud frequently quoted Wundt's cultural psychology. In its time, Wundt's Ethik received more reviews than almost any of his other main works. Most of the objections were ranged against his renouncing any ultimate transcendental ethical basis (God, the Absolute), as well as against his ideas regarding evolution, i.e. that ethical standards changed culturally in the course of human intellectual development. As Wundt did not describe any concrete ethical conflicts on the basis of examples and did not describe any social ethics in particular, his teachings with the general idea of humanism appear rather too abstract.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: The "XXII International Congress for Psychology in Leipzig in 1980", i.e. on the hundredth jubilee of the initial founding of the Institute in 1879, stimulated a number of publications about Wundt, also in the US Very little productive research work has been carried out since then. While Wundt was occasionally mentioned in the centenary review of the founding of the "German Society for Experimental Psychology" 1904/2004, it was without the principal ideas of his psychology and philosophy of science.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: Leipzig was a world-famous centre for the new psychology after 1874. There are various interpretations regarding why Wundt's influence after the turn of the century, i.e. during his lifetime, rapidly waned and from his position as founding father Wundt became almost an outsider. A survey was conducted on the basis of more than 200 contemporary and later sources: reviews and critiques of his publications (since 1858), references to Wundt's work in textbooks on psychology and the history of psychology (from 1883 to 2010), biographies, congress reports, praise on his decadal birthdays, obituaries and other texts. A range of scientific controversies were presented in detail. Reasons for the distancing of Wundt and why some of his concepts have fallen into oblivion can be seen in his scientific work, in his philosophical orientation, in his didactics or in the person of Wundt himself:


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: Wundt's terminology also created difficulties because he had – from today's point-of-view – given some of his most important ideas unfortunate names so that there were constant misunderstandings. Examples include:


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: A representation of Wundt's psychology as 'natural science', 'element psychology' or 'dualistic' conceptions is evidence of enduring misunderstandings. It is therefore necessary to remember Wundt's expressly stated desire for uniformity and lack of contradiction, for the mutual supplementation of psychological perspectives. Wundt's more demanding, sometimes more complicated and relativizing, then again very precise style can also be difficult – even for today's German readers; a high level of linguistic competence is required. There are only English translations for very few of Wundt's work. In particular, the "Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie" expanded into three volumes and the ten volumes of Völkerpsychologie, all the books on philosophy and important essays on the theory of science remain untranslated.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: Such shortcomings may explain many of the fundamental deficits and lasting misunderstandings in the Anglo-American reception of Wundt's work. Massive misconceptions about Wundt's work have been demonstrated by William James, Granville Stanley Hall, Edward Boring and Edward Titchener as well as among many later authors. Titchener, a two-year resident of Wundt's lab and one of Wundt's most vocal advocates in the United States, is responsible for several English translations and mistranslations of Wundt's works that supported his own views and approach, which he termed "structuralism" and claimed was wholly consistent with Wundt's position.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: As Wundt's three-volume Logik und Wissenschaftslehre, i.e. his theory of science, also remains untranslated the close interrelationships between Wundt's empirical psychology and his epistemology and methodology, philosophy and ethics are also regularly missing, even if later collections describe individual facets of them. Blumenthal's assessment that "American textbook accounts of Wundt now present highly inaccurate and mythological caricatures of the man and his work" still appears to be true of most publications about Wundt.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: A highly contradictory picture emerges from any systematic research on his reception. On the one hand, the pioneer of experimental psychology and founder of modern psychology as a discipline is praised, on the other hand, his work is insufficiently tapped and appears to have had little influence. Misunderstandings and stereotypical evaluations continue into the present, even in some representations of the history of psychology and in textbooks. Wundt's entire work is investigated in a more focused manner in more recent assessments regarding the reception of Wundt, and his theory of science and his philosophy is included (Araujo, 2016; Danziger, 1983, 1990, 2001; Fahrenberg, 2011, 2015, 2016; Jüttemann, 2006; Kim, 2016; van Rappard, 1980).


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: Like other important psychologists and philosophers, Wundt was subject to ideological criticism, for example by authors of a more Christianity-based psychology, by authors with materialistic and positivistic scientific opinions, or from the point-of-view of Marxist-Leninist philosophy and social theory, as in Leipzig, German Democratic Republic, up to 1990.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: There are many forms of criticism of Wundt's psychology, of his apperception psychology, of his motivation theory, of his version of psychophysical parallelism with its concept of "mental causality", his refutation of psychoanalytic speculation about the unconscious, or of his critical realism. A recurring criticism is that Wundt largely ignored the areas of psychology that he found less interesting, such as differential psychology, child psychology and educational psychology. In his cultural psychology there is no empirical social psychology because there were still no methods for investigating it at the time. Among his postgraduate students, assistants and other colleagues, however, were several important pioneers: differential psychology, "mental measurement" and intelligence testing (James McKeen Cattell, Charles Spearman), social psychology of group pocesses and the psychology of work (Walther Moede), applied psychology (Ernst Meumann, Hugo Münsterberg), psychopathology, psychopharmacology and clinical diagnosis (Emil Kraepelin). Wundt further influenced many American psychologists to create psychology graduate programs.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: Wundt developed the first comprehensive and uniform theory of the science of psychology. The special epistemological and methodological status of psychology is postulated in this wide-ranging conceptualization, characterized by his neurophysiological, psychological and philosophical work. The human as a thinking and motivated subject is not to be captured in the terms of the natural sciences. Psychology requires special categories and autonomous epistemological principles. It is, on the one hand, an empirical humanity but should not, on the other hand, ignore its physiological basis and philosophical assumptions. Thus a varied, multi-method approach is necessary: self-observation, experimentation, generic comparison and interpretation. Wundt demanded the ability and readiness to distinguish between perspectives and reference systems, and to understand the necessary supplementation of these reference systems in changes of perspective. He defined the field of psychology very widely and as interdisciplinary, and also explained just how indispensable is the epistemological-philosophical criticism of psychological theories and their philosophical prerequisites. Psychology should remain connected with philosophy in order to promote this critique of knowledge of the metaphysical presuppositions so widespread among psychologists.


title: Wilhelm Wundt

text: The conceptual relationships within the complete works created over decades and continuously reworked have hardly been systematically investigated. The most important theoretical basis is the empirical-psychological theory of apperception, based on Leibniz's philosophical position, that Wundt, on the one hand, based on experimental psychology and his neuropsychological modelling and, on the other hand, extrapolated into a development theory for culture. The fundamental reconstruction of Wundt's main ideas is a task that cannot be achieved by any one person today due to the complexity of the complete works. He tried to connect the fundamental controversies of the research directions epistemologically and methodologically by means of a co-ordinated concept – in a confident handling of the categorically basically different ways of considering the interrelations. Here, during the founding phase of university psychology, he already argued for a highly demanding meta-science meta-scientific reflection – and this potential to stimulate interdisciplinarity und perspectivism (complementary approaches) has by no means been exhausted.


title: Optical microscope

text: The optical microscope, also referred to as a light microscope, is a type of microscope that commonly uses visible light and a system of lenses to generate magnified images of small objects. Optical microscopes are the oldest design of microscope and were possibly invented in their present compound form in the 17th century. Basic optical microscopes can be very simple, although many complex designs aim to improve resolution and sample contrast.


title: Optical microscope

text: The object is placed on a stage and may be directly viewed through one or two eyepieces on the microscope. In high-power microscopes, both eyepieces typically show the same image, but with a stereo microscope, slightly different images are used to create a 3-D effect. A camera is typically used to capture the image (micrograph).


title: Optical microscope

text: The sample can be lit in a variety of ways. Transparent objects can be lit from below and solid objects can be lit with light coming through (bright field) or around (dark field) the objective lens. Polarised light may be used to determine crystal orientation of metallic objects. Phase-contrast imaging can be used to increase image contrast by highlighting small details of differing refractive index.


title: Optical microscope

text: A range of objective lenses with different magnification are usually provided mounted on a turret, allowing them to be rotated into place and providing an ability to zoom-in. The maximum magnification power of optical microscopes is typically limited to around 1000x because of the limited resolving power of visible light. While larger magnifications are possible no additional details of the object are resolved.


title: Optical microscope

text: Alternatives to optical microscopy which do not use visible light include scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy and scanning probe microscopy and as a result, can achieve much greater magnifications.


title: Optical microscope

text: There are two basic types of optical microscopes: simple microscopes and compound microscopes. A simple microscope uses the optical power of single lens or group of lenses for magnification. A compound microscope uses a system of lenses (one set enlarging the image produced by another) to achieve much higher magnification of an object. The vast majority of modern research microscopes are compound microscopes while some cheaper commercial digital microscopes are simple single lens microscopes. Compound microscopes can be further divided into a variety of other types of microscopes which differ in their optical configurations, cost, and intended purposes.


title: Optical microscope

text: A simple microscope uses a lens or set of lenses to enlarge an object through angular magnification alone, giving the viewer an erect enlarged virtual image. The use of a single convex lens or groups of lenses are found in simple magnification devices such as the magnifying glass, loupes, and eyepieces for telescopes and microscopes.


title: Optical microscope

text: A compound microscope uses a lens close to the object being viewed to collect light (called the objective lens) which focuses a real image of the object inside the microscope (image 1). That image is then magnified by a second lens or group of lenses (called the eyepiece) that gives the viewer an enlarged inverted virtual image of the object (image 2). The use of a compound objective/eyepiece combination allows for much higher magnification. Common compound microscopes often feature exchangeable objective lenses, allowing the user to quickly adjust the magnification. A compound microscope also enables more advanced illumination setups, such as phase contrast.


title: Optical microscope

text: There are many variants of the compound optical microscope design for specialized purposes. Some of these are physical design differences allowing specialization for certain purposes:


title: Optical microscope

text: A digital microscope is a microscope equipped with a digital camera allowing observation of a sample via a computer. Microscopes can also be partly or wholly computer-controlled with various levels of automation. Digital microscopy allows greater analysis of a microscope image, for example, measurements of distances and areas and quantitation of a fluorescent or histological stain.


title: Optical microscope

text: Low-powered digital microscopes, USB microscopes, are also commercially available. These are essentially webcams with a high-powered macro lens and generally do not use transillumination. The camera attached directly to the USB port of a computer so that the images are shown directly on the monitor. They offer modest magnifications (up to about 200×) without the need to use eyepieces, and at very low cost. High power illumination is usually provided by an LED source or sources adjacent to the camera lens.


title: Optical microscope

text: Digital microscopy with very low light levels to avoid damage to vulnerable biological samples is available using sensitive photon-counting digital cameras. It has been demonstrated that a light source providing pairs of entangled photons may minimize the risk of damage to the most light-sensitive samples. In this application of ghost imaging to photon-sparse microscopy, the sample is illuminated with infrared photons, each of which is spatially correlated with an entangled partner in the visible band for efficient imaging by a photon-counting camera.


title: Optical microscope

text: The earliest microscopes were single lens magnifying glasses with limited magnification which date at least as far back as the widespread use of lenses in eyeglasses in the 13th century.


title: Optical microscope

text: Compound microscopes first appeared in Europe around 1620 including one demonstrated by Cornelis Drebbel in London (around 1621) and one exhibited in Rome in 1624.


title: Optical microscope

text: The actual inventor of the compound microscope is unknown although many claims have been made over the years. These include a claim 35 years after they appeared by Dutch spectacle-maker Johannes Zachariassen that his father, Zacharias Janssen, invented the compound microscope and/or the telescope as early as 1590. Johannes' (some claim dubious) testimony pushes the invention date so far back that Zacharias would have been a child at the time, leading to speculation that, for Johannes' claim to be true, the compound microscope would have to have been invented by Johannes' grandfather, Hans Martens. Another claim is that Janssen's competitor, Hans Lippershey (who applied for the first telescope patent in 1608) also invented the compound microscope. Other historians point to the Dutch innovator Cornelis Drebbel with his 1621 compound microscope.


title: Optical microscope

text: Galileo Galilei is also sometimes cited as a compound microscope inventor. After 1610, he found that he could close focus his telescope to view small objects, such as flies, close up and/or could look through the wrong end in reverse to magnify small objects. The only drawback was that his 2 foot long telescope had to be extended out to 6 feet to view objects that close. After seeing the compound microscope built by Drebbel exhibited in Rome in 1624, Galileo built his own improved version. In 1625, Giovanni Faber coined the name "microscope" for the compound microscope Galileo submitted to the Accademia dei Lincei in 1624 (Galileo had called it the ""occhiolino"" or ""little eye""). Faber coined the name from the Greek words "μικρόν" (micron) meaning "small", and "σκοπεῖν" (skopein) meaning "to look at", a name meant to be analogous with "telescope", another word coined by the Linceans.


title: Optical microscope

text: Christiaan Huygens, another Dutchman, developed a simple 2-lens ocular system in the late 17th century that was achromatically corrected, and therefore a huge step forward in microscope development. The Huygens ocular is still being produced to this day, but suffers from a small field size, and other minor disadvantages.


title: Optical microscope

text: Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1724) is credited with bringing the microscope to the attention of biologists, even though simple magnifying lenses were already being produced in the 16th century. Van Leeuwenhoek's home-made microscopes were simple microscopes, with a single very small, yet strong lens. They were awkward in use, but enabled van Leeuwenhoek to see detailed images. It took about 150 years of optical development before the compound microscope was able to provide the same quality image as van Leeuwenhoek's simple microscopes, due to difficulties in configuring multiple lenses. In the 1850s, John Leonard Riddell, Professor of Chemistry at Tulane University, invented the first practical binocular microscope while carrying out one of the earliest and most extensive American microscopic investigations of cholera.


title: Optical microscope

text: While basic microscope technology and optics have been available for over 400 years it is much more recently that techniques in sample illumination were developed to generate the high quality images seen today.


title: Optical microscope

text: In August 1893, August Köhler developed Köhler illumination. This method of sample illumination gives rise to extremely even lighting and overcomes many limitations of older techniques of sample illumination. Before development of Köhler illumination the image of the light source, for example a lightbulb filament, was always visible in the image of the sample.


title: Optical microscope

text: The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Dutch physicist Frits Zernike in 1953 for his development of phase contrast illumination which allows imaging of transparent samples. By using interference rather than absorption of light, extremely transparent samples, such as live mammalian cells, can be imaged without having to use staining techniques. Just two years later, in 1955, Georges Nomarski published the theory for differential interference contrast microscopy, another interference-based imaging technique.


title: Optical microscope

text: Modern biological microscopy depends heavily on the development of fluorescent probes for specific structures within a cell. In contrast to normal transilluminated light microscopy, in fluorescence microscopy the sample is illuminated through the objective lens with a narrow set of wavelengths of light. This light interacts with fluorophores in the sample which then emit light of a longer wavelength. It is this emitted light which makes up the image.


title: Optical microscope

text: Since the mid-20th century chemical fluorescent stains, such as DAPI which binds to DNA, have been used to label specific structures within the cell. More recent developments include immunofluorescence, which uses fluorescently labelled antibodies to recognise specific proteins within a sample, and fluorescent proteins like GFP which a live cell can express making it fluorescent.


title: Optical microscope

text: All modern optical microscopes designed for viewing samples by transmitted light share the same basic components of the light path. In addition, the vast majority of microscopes have the same 'structural' components (numbered below according to the image on the right):


title: Optical microscope

text: The eyepiece, or ocular lens, is a cylinder containing two or more lenses; its function is to bring the image into focus for the eye. The eyepiece is inserted into the top end of the body tube. Eyepieces are interchangeable and many different eyepieces can be inserted with different degrees of magnification. Typical magnification values for eyepieces include 5×, 10× (the most common), 15× and 20×. In some high performance microscopes, the optical configuration of the objective lens and eyepiece are matched to give the best possible optical performance. This occurs most commonly with apochromatic objectives.


title: Optical microscope

text: Objective turret, revolver, or revolving nose piece is the part that holds the set of objective lenses. It allows the user to switch between objective lenses.


title: Optical microscope

text: At the lower end of a typical compound optical microscope, there are one or more objective lenses that collect light from the sample. The objective is usually in a cylinder housing containing a glass single or multi-element compound lens. Typically there will be around three objective lenses screwed into a circular nose piece which may be rotated to select the required objective lens. These arrangements are designed to be parfocal, which means that when one changes from one lens to another on a microscope, the sample stays in focus. Microscope objectives are characterized by two parameters, namely, magnification and numerical aperture. The former typically ranges from 5× to 100× while the latter ranges from 0.14 to 0.7, corresponding to focal lengths of about 40 to 2 mm, respectively. Objective lenses with higher magnifications normally have a higher numerical aperture and a shorter depth of field in the resulting image. Some high performance objective lenses may require matched eyepieces to deliver the best optical performance.


title: Optical microscope

text: Some microscopes make use of oil-immersion objectives or water-immersion objectives for greater resolution at high magnification. These are used with index-matching material such as immersion oil or water and a matched cover slip between the objective lens and the sample. The refractive index of the index-matching material is higher than air allowing the objective lens to have a larger numerical aperture (greater than 1) so that the light is transmitted from the specimen to the outer face of the objective lens with minimal refraction. Numerical apertures as high as 1.6 can be achieved. The larger numerical aperture allows collection of more light making detailed observation of smaller details possible. An oil immersion lens usually has a magnification of 40 to 100×.


title: Optical microscope

text: Adjustment knobs move the stage up and down with separate adjustment for coarse and fine focusing. The same controls enable the microscope to adjust to specimens of different thickness. In older designs of microscopes, the focus adjustment wheels move the microscope tube up or down relative to the stand and had a fixed stage.


title: Optical microscope

text: The whole of the optical assembly is traditionally attached to a rigid arm, which in turn is attached to a robust U-shaped foot to provide the necessary rigidity. The arm angle may be adjustable to allow the viewing angle to be adjusted.


title: Optical microscope

text: The frame provides a mounting point for various microscope controls. Normally this will include controls for focusing, typically a large knurled wheel to adjust coarse focus, together with a smaller knurled wheel to control fine focus. Other features may be lamp controls and/or controls for adjusting the condenser.


title: Optical microscope

text: The stage is a platform below the objective lens which supports the specimen being viewed. In the center of the stage is a hole through which light passes to illuminate the specimen. The stage usually has arms to hold slides (rectangular glass plates with typical dimensions of 25×75 mm, on which the specimen is mounted).


title: Optical microscope

text: At magnifications higher than 100× moving a slide by hand is not practical. A mechanical stage, typical of medium and higher priced microscopes, allows tiny movements of the slide via control knobs that reposition the sample/slide as desired. If a microscope did not originally have a mechanical stage it may be possible to add one.


title: Optical microscope

text: All stages move up and down for focus. With a mechanical stage slides move on two horizontal axes for positioning the specimen to examine specimen details.


title: Optical microscope

text: Focusing starts at lower magnification in order to center the specimen by the user on the stage. Moving to a higher magnification requires the stage to be moved higher vertically for re-focus at the higher magnification and may also require slight horizontal specimen position adjustment. Horizontal specimen position adjustments are the reason for having a mechanical stage.


title: Optical microscope

text: Due to the difficulty in preparing specimens and mounting them on slides, for children it is best to begin with prepared slides that are centered and focus easily regardless of the focus level used.


title: Optical microscope

text: Many sources of light can be used. At its simplest, daylight is directed via a mirror. Most microscopes, however, have their own adjustable and controllable light source – often a halogen lamp, although illumination using LEDs and lasers are becoming a more common provision. Köhler illumination is often provided on more expensive instruments.


title: Optical microscope

text: The condenser is a lens designed to focus light from the illumination source onto the sample. The condenser may also include other features, such as a diaphragm and/or filters, to manage the quality and intensity of the illumination. For illumination techniques like dark field, phase contrast and differential interference contrast microscopy additional optical components must be precisely aligned in the light path.


title: Optical microscope

text: The actual power or magnification of a compound optical microscope is the product of the powers of the eyepiece and the objective lens. For example a 10x eyepiece magnification and a 100x objective lens magnification gives a total magnification of 1,000×. Modified environments such as the use of oil or ultraviolet light can increase the resolution and allow for resolved details at magnifications larger than 1,000x.


title: Optical microscope

text: Many techniques are available which modify the light path to generate an improved contrast image from a sample. Major techniques for generating increased contrast from the sample include cross-polarized light, dark field, phase contrast and differential interference contrast illumination. A recent technique (Sarfus) combines cross-polarized light and specific contrast-enhanced slides for the visualization of nanometric samples.


title: Optical microscope

text: <gallery caption="Four examples of transilumination techniques used to generate contrast in a sample of tissue paper. 1.559 μm/pixel." align="center">


title: Optical microscope

text: File:Paper Micrograph Bright.png|Bright field illumination, sample contrast comes from absorbance of light in the sample.


title: Optical microscope

text: File:Paper Micrograph Cross-Polarised.png|Cross-polarized light illumination, sample contrast comes from rotation of polarized light through the sample.


title: Optical microscope

text: File:Paper Micrograph Dark.png|Dark field illumination, sample contrast comes from light scattered by the sample.


title: Optical microscope

text: File:Paper Micrograph Phase.png|Phase contrast illumination, sample contrast comes from interference of different path lengths of light through the sample.


title: Optical microscope

text: Modern microscopes allow more than just observation of transmitted light image of a sample; there are many techniques which can be used to extract other kinds of data. Most of these require additional equipment in addition to a basic compound microscope.


title: Optical microscope

text: Optical microscopy is used extensively in microelectronics, nanophysics, biotechnology, pharmaceutic research, mineralogy and microbiology.


title: Optical microscope

text: Optical microscopy is used for medical diagnosis, the field being termed histopathology when dealing with tissues, or in smear tests on free cells or tissue fragments.


title: Optical microscope

text: In industrial use, binocular microscopes are common. Aside from applications needing true depth perception, the use of dual eyepieces reduces eye strain associated with long workdays at a microscopy station. In certain applications, long-working-distance or long-focus microscopes are beneficial. An item may need to be examined behind a window, or industrial subjects may be a hazard to the objective. Such optics resemble telescopes with close-focus capabilities.


title: Optical microscope

text: One has a reticle graduated to allow measuring distances in the focal plane. The other (and older) type has simple crosshairs and a micrometer mechanism for moving the subject relative to the microscope.


title: Optical microscope

text: Very small, portable microscopes have found some usage in places where a laboratory microscope would be a burden.


title: Optical microscope

text: At very high magnifications with transmitted light, point objects are seen as fuzzy discs surrounded by diffraction rings. These are called Airy disks. The "resolving power" of a microscope is taken as the ability to distinguish between two closely spaced Airy disks (or, in other words the ability of the microscope to reveal adjacent structural detail as distinct and separate). It is these impacts of diffraction that limit the ability to resolve fine details. The extent and magnitude of the diffraction patterns are affected by both the wavelength of light (λ), the refractive materials used to manufacture the objective lens and the numerical aperture (NA) of the objective lens. There is therefore a finite limit beyond which it is impossible to resolve separate points in the objective field, known as the diffraction limit. Assuming that optical aberrations in the whole optical set-up are negligible, the resolution "d", can be stated as:


title: Optical microscope

text: Usually a wavelength of 550 nm is assumed, which corresponds to green light. With air as the external medium, the highest practical "NA" is 0.95, and with oil, up to 1.5. In practice the lowest value of "d" obtainable with conventional lenses is about 200 nm. A new type of lens using multiple scattering of light allowed to improve the resolution to below 100 nm.


title: Optical microscope

text: Multiple techniques are available for reaching resolutions higher than the transmitted light limit described above. Holographic techniques, as described by Courjon and Bulabois in 1979, are also capable of breaking this resolution limit, although resolution was restricted in their experimental analysis.


title: Optical microscope

text: Using fluorescent samples more techniques are available. Examples include Vertico SMI, near field scanning optical microscopy which uses evanescent waves, and stimulated emission depletion. In 2005, a microscope capable of detecting a single molecule was described as a teaching tool.


title: Optical microscope

text: Despite significant progress in the last decade, techniques for surpassing the diffraction limit remain limited and specialized.


title: Optical microscope

text: While most techniques focus on increases in lateral resolution there are also some techniques which aim to allow analysis of extremely thin samples. For example, sarfus methods place the thin sample on a contrast-enhancing surface and thereby allows to directly visualize films as thin as 0.3 nanometers.


title: Optical microscope

text: On 8 October 2014, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Eric Betzig, William Moerner and Stefan Hell for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy.


title: Optical microscope

text: SMI (spatially modulated illumination microscopy) is a light optical process of the so-called point spread function (PSF) engineering. These are processes which modify the PSF of a microscope in a suitable manner to either increase the optical resolution, to maximize the precision of distance measurements of fluorescent objects that are small relative to the wavelength of the illuminating light, or to extract other structural parameters in the nanometer range.


title: Optical microscope

text: SPDM (spectral precision distance microscopy), the basic localization microscopy technology is a light optical process of fluorescence microscopy which allows position, distance and angle measurements on "optically isolated" particles (e.g. molecules) well below the theoretical limit of resolution for light microscopy. "Optically isolated" means that at a given point in time, only a single particle/molecule within a region of a size determined by conventional optical resolution (typically approx. 200–250 nm diameter) is being registered. This is possible when molecules within such a region all carry different spectral markers (e.g. different colors or other usable differences in the light emission of different particles).


title: Optical microscope

text: Many standard fluorescent dyes like GFP, Alexa dyes, Atto dyes, Cy2/Cy3 and fluorescein molecules can be used for localization microscopy, provided certain photo-physical conditions are present. Using this so-called SPDMphymod (physically modifiable fluorophores) technology a single laser wavelength of suitable intensity is sufficient for nanoimaging.


title: Optical microscope

text: 3D super resolution microscopy with standard fluorescent dyes can be achieved by combination of localization microscopy for standard fluorescent dyes SPDMphymod and structured illumination SMI.


title: Optical microscope

text: Stimulated emission depletion is a simple example of how higher resolution surpassing the diffraction limit is possible, but it has major limitations. STED is a fluorescence microscopy technique which uses a combination of light pulses to induce fluorescence in a small sub-population of fluorescent molecules in a sample. Each molecule produces a diffraction-limited spot of light in the image, and the centre of each of these spots corresponds to the location of the molecule. As the number of fluorescing molecules is low the spots of light are unlikely to overlap and therefore can be placed accurately. This process is then repeated many times to generate the image. Stefan Hell of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry was awarded the 10th German Future Prize in 2006 and Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2014 for his development of the STED microscope and associated methodologies.


title: Optical microscope

text: In order to overcome the limitations set by the diffraction limit of visible light other microscopes have been designed which use other waves.


title: Optical microscope

text: It is important to note that higher frequency waves have limited interaction with matter, for example soft tissues are relatively transparent to X-rays resulting in distinct sources of contrast and different target applications.


title: Optical microscope

text: The use of electrons and X-rays in place of light allows much higher resolution – the wavelength of the radiation is shorter so the diffraction limit is lower. To make the


title: Optical microscope

text: short-wavelength probe non-destructive, the atomic beam imaging system (atomic nanoscope) has been proposed and widely discussed in the literature, but it is not yet competitive with conventional imaging systems.


title: Optical microscope

text: STM and AFM are scanning probe techniques using a small probe which is scanned over the sample surface. Resolution in these cases is limited by the size of the probe; micromachining techniques can produce probes with tip radii of 5–10 nm.


title: Optical microscope

text: Additionally, methods such as electron or X-ray microscopy use a vacuum or partial vacuum, which limits their use for live and biological samples (with the exception of an environmental scanning electron microscope). The specimen chambers needed for all such instruments also limits sample size, and sample manipulation is more difficult. Color cannot be seen in images made by these methods, so some information is lost. They are however, essential when investigating molecular or atomic effects, such as age hardening in aluminium alloys, or the microstructure of polymers.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: Vandenberg Space Force Base , previously Vandenberg Air Force Base, is a United States Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County, California. Established in 1941, Vandenberg Space Force Base is a space launch base, launching spacecraft from the Western Range, and also performs missile testing. The United States Space Force's Space Launch Delta 30 serves as the host delta for the base. In addition to its military space launch mission, Vandenberg Space Force Base also performs space launches for civil and commercial space entities, such as NASA and SpaceX.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: In 1941, the United States Army embarked on an initiative to acquire lands in the United States to be used to train its infantry and armored forces. These areas needed to be of a varied nature to ensure relevant training. In March 1941, the Army acquired approximately of open ranch lands along the Central Coast of California between Lompoc and Santa Maria. Most of the land was purchased. Smaller parcels were obtained either by lease, license, or as easements. With its flat plateau, surrounding hills, numerous canyons, and relative remoteness from populated areas, the Army was convinced it had found the ideal training location.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: Construction of the Army camp began in September 1941. Although its completion was still months away, the Army activated the camp on 5 October 1941, and named it Camp Cooke in honor of Major General Phillip St. George Cooke.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: General Cooke was a cavalry officer whose military career spanned almost half a century, beginning with his graduation from West Point in 1827 to his retirement in 1873. He participated in the Mexican War, the Indian Wars, and the Civil War. A native of Virginia, General Cooke remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War. Perhaps his most enduring achievement came when as a colonel during the Mexican War, he led a battalion of Mormons from Missouri to California. The route led by Colonel Cooke in 1847 opened the first wagon route to California, and today the railroad follows much of the early wagon trails.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: Although the construction of Camp Cooke continued well into 1942, troop training did not wait. The 5th Armored Division rolled into camp in February and March 1942. From then until the end of the war, other armored and infantry divisions kept up the din before they too left for overseas duty.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: Besides the 5th Division, the 6th, 11th, 13th, and 20th Armored Divisions as well as the 86th and 97th Infantry Divisions, and the 2nd Filipino Infantry Regiment were all stationed at Cooke at varying times during the war. Also trained at Cooke were an assortment of anti-aircraft artillery, combat engineer, ordnance, and hospital units. Over 400 separate and distinct outfits passed through Camp Cooke.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: As the war progressed, German and Italian prisoners of war (the latter organized into Italian Service Units) were quartered at Camp Cooke. Both groups were kept separate from each other in accordance with the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, and worked on the post at various jobs including mechanical and civil engineering services, clerical positions, food service, and the main laundry. To help relieve the severe labor shortage in the commercial market created by wartime exigencies, the Germans also worked in local communities – mostly in agricultural jobs.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: A maximum security army disciplinary barracks was constructed on post property in 1946. Confined to the facility were military prisoners from throughout the Army. When Camp Cooke closed in June 1946, personnel at the disciplinary barracks received the additional duty as installation caretakers. The vast majority of the camp was then leased for agriculture and grazing purposes.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: From August 1950 to February 1953, Camp Cooke served as a training installation for units slated for combat in Korea, and as a summer training base for many other reserve units. On 1 February 1953, the camp was again inactivated. The disciplinary barracks, meanwhile, was transferred to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to house civilian offenders in August 1959. Today it is known as the United States Penitentiary, Lompoc.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: In September 2000, veterans of the 40th Infantry Division gathered at Vandenberg Air Force Base to dedicate its Korean War Memorial. In June 2001, most remnants of Camp Cooke, including some barracks used by the 40th Infantry Division during its mobilization for the Korean War, were torn down; only a few buildings, including the boxing annex and the gymnasium annex, were left standing until they too were torn down in 2010.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: With the advent of the missile age in the 1950s, an urgent need arose for an adequate training site that could also serve as a first combat ready missile base. In January 1956, a select committee was formed that examined more than 200 potential sites before Camp Cooke was chosen, essentially for the same characteristics the Army found desirable in 1941. Besides its size, remoteness from heavily populated areas, and moderate climate which afforded year-round operations Cooke's coastal location allowed missiles to be launched into the Pacific Ocean without population overflights. This same geographic feature also enabled satellites to be launched into polar orbit directly toward the South Pole without overflying any land mass until reaching Antarctica.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: In September 1956, Secretary of the Air Force Donald A. Quarles accepted the committee's recommendation. A few weeks later, on 16 November 1956, Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson directed the Army to transfer of North Camp Cooke to the United States Air Force for use as a missile launch and training base and in June 1957, North Camp Cooke was renamed Cooke Air Force Base (AFB), and on 21 June 1957 it was transferred to the Air Force. In January 1957, however, the Air Force had received access to the camp, and with the arrival of the first airman in February 1957, established on the 15th the 6591st Support Squadron. The initial mission of Cooke AFB was to serve both as a training site for the PGM-17 Thor, SM-65 Atlas, and HGM-25A Titan I missiles, and as an emergency operational facility for Atlas ICBM.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The base was a cluttered mass of dilapidated World War II era structures amid weeds and brush. Roads-mostly gravel and dirt trails-were in need of extensive repair. In late April 1957, parallel renovation and construction programs started. Over the next two years, missile launch and control facilities began to appear. Old buildings were renovated and new ones built, including Capehart military family housing. The work was already in process when the Air Force hosted the official ground breaking ceremonies on 8 May 1957.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: To operate Cooke AFB, the 392d Air Base Group was activated, replacing the 6591st Support Squadron on 15 April 1957. With the activation of the 704th Strategic Missile Wing (Atlas) at Cooke on 1 July 1957, the 392d was assigned to the wing. This was the first Air Force ballistic missile wing. On 16 July 1957, the 1st Missile Division, activated three months earlier in Inglewood, California, relocated to Cooke AFB to supervise wing operations. During this formative period, the work of these latter two organizations involved planning for missile operations and training. The Division was assigned to Air Force Ballistic Missile Division (AFBMD) in Inglewood, California, which in turn reported to Air Research and Development Command (ARDC) at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The launching of the Soviet Sputnik 1 satellite into orbit on 4 October 1957, followed a month later by Sputnik 2 that carried a dog, Laika, into orbit, had military implications and caused an immediate acceleration of the United States Air Force's missile program. As part of the acceleration, on 23 November 1957, the U.S. Department of Defense authorized the peacetime launching of ballistic missiles from Cooke AFB. The Air Force transferred management responsibilities for Cooke AFB from ARDC to the Strategic Air Command (SAC) on 1 January 1958. Along with the transfer, SAC acquired the three ARDC base organizations and responsibility for attaining initial operational capability (IOC) for the nascent U.S. missile force. Their mission also included training missile launch crews.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The reorganization allowed ARDC to retain responsibility for site activation as well as research and development testing of ballistic missiles, also known as Category II testing. These activities were carried out by an AFBMD field office established at Cooke shortly after the transfers of January 1958. Space launches were to be conducted by ARDC and SAC. However, the vast majority of these operations were later handled by ARDC. Sharing the mission at Cooke, the two commands cultivated a close relationship that was to flourish for the next 35 years.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: On 12 February 1958, the U.S. Department of Defense transferred executive responsibility for the PGM-19 Jupiter (IRBM) from the U.S. Department of the Army to the U.S. Air Force. Headquarters SAC transferred the 864th Strategic Missile Squadron (IRBM-Jupiter) from Huntsville, Alabama, to Cooke AFB. In April 1958, Headquarters SAC activated the 576th Strategic Missile Squadron (ICBM-Atlas) at Cooke AFB. It was SAC's first ICBM squadron and first Atlas squadron. Initially, it consisted of two "soft" Series D Atlas complexes (576A and 576B). The first had three gantries while the second had three above ground coffin launchers (the term "coffin launcher" is used because the missile was laid on its side horizontally with the enclosure door or coffin-lid situated above, offering enhanced protection for the launcher), similar to those planned for the first squadron in the field. Each complex had one launch control center. Thus, the squadron had a 3 x 2 configuration. In July 1958, construction began at Cooke AFB on the Operational System Test Facility (OSTF) for the Titan I ICBM. This was the prototype of the hardened Titan I launch control facility and consisted of one silo-lift launcher, blockhouse, and associated equipment. The first Thor IRBM arrived at Cooke AFB in August 1958.On 1 January 1958, Lieutenant General David Wade of Louisiana was assigned as commander of the 1st Missile Division at Cooke. There he commanded the first operational missile unit in Air Force history. His commission was twofold:


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The southern portion of Cooke AFB (formerly Camp Cooke), consisting of more than , was transferred to the U.S. Navy in May 1958. The Navy was in the process of establishing a Pacific Missile Range (PMR) with a headquarters south of Cooke at Point Mugu, and instrumentation sites along the California coast and at various islands down range in the Pacific Ocean. The property it acquired was renamed the Naval Missile Facility at Point Arguello. It became a major launch head and range safety center for all missile and satellite launch operations conducted within the PMR.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: On 16 November 1963, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara ordered a restructuring in the way the U.S. Department of Defense managed and operated its missile ranges and flight test facilities across the nation. Part of the force restructuring had the Navy transfer major sections of its Pacific Missile Range, including its Point Arguello installation, to the Air Force in two parts. The first transfer occurred on 1 July 1964. In the second part of the transfer, remote properties and mobile resources, explained in detail in the next section, were handed over to Vandenberg on 1 February 1965.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: With the Navy's missile program and range authorities scaled back to the area around Point Mugu, the Air Force now assumed full responsibility for missile range safety at Vandenberg and over much of the Pacific Ocean. The Air Force renamed this geographical area the Air Force Western Test Range (AFWTR). The designation remained until 1979 when it was shortened to the Western Test Range.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The final land acquisition at Vandenberg occurred on 1 March 1966, after the Air Force had announced plans to construct Vandenberg Space Launch Complex 6 for its Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) program. Flight safety corridors for the Titan III MOL vehicle reportedly extended south of Point Arguello and inland to an area known as Sudden Ranch. The Air Force sought to purchase this property, but when negotiations with the Sudden Estate Company failed to reach a compromise purchase price, the government turned to condemnation proceedings (under the power of eminent domain). By filing a Declaration of Taking with the federal court in Los Angeles, it obtained almost of Sudden Ranch. Finalized on 20 December 1968, the federal court established US$9,002,500 as the purchase price for the land. The total amount paid to the company with interest was US$9,842,700.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The annexation of Sudden Ranch increased the size of the base to its present , making Vandenberg the largest Air Force base.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: On 4 October 1958, Cooke AFB was renamed Vandenberg Air Force Base (AFB), in honor of General Hoyt Vandenberg, the Air Force's second Chief of Staff.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The transition from U.S. Army camp to missile base solidified on 15 December 1958 when Vandenberg AFB successfully launched its first missile, a PGM-17 Thor IRBM (Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile). The launch from Vandenberg inaugurated the intermediate-range ballistic missile portion of the Pacific Missile Range and was fired by a crew from the 1st Missile Division. The first successful launch of a Thor IRBM by a Royal Air Force crew took place at Vandenberg AFB on 16 April 1959. The launch was part of integrated weapon system training. In October 1959, the first combat training launch of a Thor IRBM by a Royal Air Force crew was successful.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: On 22 April 1960, the fourth and final British-based Thor IRBM squadron was turned over to the Royal Air Force by the Strategic Air Command, thus completing the deployment of this weapon system in the United Kingdom. The next month, the first missile to be removed from an operational unit and sent to Vandenberg AFB for confidence firing arrived from a Thor IRBM squadron (No. 98 Squadron RAF) in the United Kingdom. Confidence firing was the predecessor of SAC's operational test program.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: On 16 October 1958, the first Atlas ICBM launcher (576A-1) constructed at Vandenberg AFB, California, was accepted from the contractor by the 1st Missile Division. The first intercontinental ballistic missile, the SM-65D Atlas ICBM, was delivered and was accepted by SAC's 576th Strategic Missile Squadron on 18 February 1959. The first Atlas-D flew on 9 September 1959, and following the successful launch, General Thomas S. Power, CINCSAC, declared the Atlas ICBM to be operational. The following month, equipped with a nuclear warhead, the Atlas at Vandenberg became the first ICBM to be placed on alert in the United States. It was an SM-69D Atlas ICBM (AFSN 58-2190) on launcher 576A-1. In April 1960, the first attempted launch of a Series D Atlas ICBM from a coffin-type launcher (576B-2) was successful. This launcher was the prototype of the ones to be used at the first operational Atlas squadron, the 564th Strategic Missile Squadron, Francis E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyoming. Following this successful launch, Major General David Wade, Commander of the 1st Missile Division, declared the coffin-type launcher to be operational.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: In July 1959, construction began on the first Series E Atlas ICBM coffin-type launcher (Atlas operational system test facility #1). On 28 February 1962, the first successful launch of the SM-65E Atlas took place. Construction began on the first SM-65F Atlas ICBM "silo-lift" launcher (Atlas operational system test facility #2) in November 1962. The first Atlas F arrived in June 1961 and the first operationally configured Series F Atlas was successfully launched on 1 August 1962.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: During its testing phase, Vandenberg would operate two Atlas-D launch complexes; two Atlas-E, and three Atlas-F silos. The Atlas-Ds were taken off alert at the 576th Strategic Missile Squadron (Complex 576B) in May 1964 as part of the phaseout of the Atlas from active ICBM service. The last Atlas F test launch was on 18 January 1965, and the 576th Strategic Missile Squadron was inactivated on 2 April 1966. The 576th SMS carried out 53 Atlas-D, 7 Atlas-E and 7 Atlas-F test launches between 1959 and 1965.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The Atlas would remain in use as a launch vehicle for satellites from Vandenberg as a space booster configured with an RM-81 Agena upper-stage rocket and the Atlas-Agena would launch many different types of satellites into orbit until its phaseout in the late 1980s.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The HGM-25A Titan I was the United States' first multistage ICBM. When designed and manufactured, the Titan I provided an additional nuclear deterrent to complement the U.S. Air Force's SM-65 Atlas missile. It was the first in a series of Titan rockets, and was an important step in building the Air Force's strategic nuclear forces.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: In July 1958, the construction began on the Titan I ICBM Operational System Test Facility (OSTF). This was the prototype of the hardened Titan I launch control facility at its operational sites. It consisted of one silo-lift launcher, blockhouse, and associated equipment. Designated "OSTF-8", the facility was destroyed on 3 December 1960 when the launcher elevator failed while lowering a fully fueled missile back into the silo. There were no injuries. This was the first silo accident at Vandenberg.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The first "silo-lift" launch of the Titan I was successful in September 1961, and the first SAC launch of the ICBM was successful in January 1962. As a result, the Titan I ICBM launch complex (395-A1/A2/A3) at Vandenberg was turned over to the Strategic Air Command 395th Strategic Missile Squadron to perform test launches of the missile.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: However, the operational lifetime of the Titan I was short, as Secretary of Defense McNamara announced in November 1964 that all remaining first-generation ICBMs (Series E and F Atlas and Titan I) would be phased out (Project Added Effort) by the end of June 1965.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: On 5 March 1965, the last test launch of a Titan I ICBM conducted by the Strategic Air Command at Vandenberg was successful. The 395th SMS performed 19 test launches between 1963 and 1965 before moving on to exclusively Titan II testing. During the 1980s, some Titan I second stages were used as targets for early Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) testing.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The LGM-25C Titan II ICBM was a second-generation ICBM with storable propellants, all inertial guidance, and in-silo launch capability. Construction of the first Titan II site began in 1962, and eventually Vandenberg operated four Titan II launch complexes.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: Most of the testing of the missile was done at Cape Kennedy Air Force Station, Florida by the 6555th Aerospace Test Group, and the first successful underground silo launch of a Titan II ICBM took place at Vandenberg by the 395th SMS in April 1963. The first fully operational test took place in March 1965.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: On 25 March 1966, the 200th SAC missile launched from Vandenberg AFB, California was a Titan II. The operational testing of the Titan II continued until 1985. Like its predecessor the Atlas ICBM, the Titan II GLV a derivative of that missile was used to launch Project Gemini spacecraft and the Titan 23G was used as a space booster to launch satellites. The final launch of a Titan II was made in 2003 when the last Titan IIG was expended.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The advent of solid-propellant gave the three-stage LGM-30 Minuteman ICBM a major advantage over earlier liquid propellant ICBMs. In February 1961, the construction began on Minuteman ICBM test launch facilities at Vandenberg. Silos 394A-1 through A-7 were the first constructed for use by the SAC 394th Strategic Missile Squadron.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: LGM-30A Minuteman IA flight tests began in September 1962. The first Minuteman IB test took place in May 1963. On 24 February 1966, the first attempted salvo (simultaneous) launch of two model "A" Minuteman I ICBMs from Vandenberg silos LF-04 (394A-3) and LF-06 (394-A5) was successful. This launch demonstrated the multiple countdown and launch techniques that would be used at operational bases under actual combat conditions. Minuteman I testing continued until 1968.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: LGM-30F Minuteman II testing began in August 1965 with the first launch conducted by Air Force Systems Command, was successful. The missile flew down the Pacific Missile Range and its reentry vehicle impacted in the target area.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: On 22 October 1970, the first attempted OT GT70F (Salvo) operational test launch (simultaneous) launch of two Minuteman II ICBMs was successful from LF-25 and LF-26. The last Minuteman II phase I operational test was performed in April 1972.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The first LGM-30G Minuteman III phase II operational test was launched on 5 December 1972 from the LF-02 silo. The ICBM flew downrange before impacting in the Pacific Ocean. This was the beginning of Minuteman III launches which continue to this day from Vandenberg.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: In July 1974, the initial training of Minuteman missile combat crews, formerly performed by Air Training Command (ATC) instructors at Vandenberg AFB, California, was incorporated into the 4315th Combat Crew Training Squadron's Operational Readiness Training (ORT) program at Vandenberg. As a result of this action, the entire Minuteman missile combat training, from beginning (initial training) to end (upgrade training) became the responsibility of Strategic Air Command.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: SAC launched two Minuteman III ICBMs from Vandenberg AFB during exercise Global Shield, a comprehensive exercise of SAC's nuclear forces on 10 July 1979 from LF 08 and LF 09. One of these Global Shield missions, Glory Trip 40 GM, was the last Minuteman III phase I operational test flight. The missiles were launched 12 seconds apart by a SAC task force from the 90th Strategic Missile Wing, Francis E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyoming.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: Glory Trip 77GM, a Minuteman III Operational Test in September 1980, became the longest Minuteman flight test when its payload impacted a broad ocean area target over downrange.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The last ICBM tested from Vandenberg was the LGM-118 Peacekeeper (MX) ICBM beginning in June 1983. In addition to having a longer range than earlier ICBMs, the Peacekeeper could deliver up to 10 reentry vehicles to separate targets. It was intended as a replacement for the LGM-30 Minuteman, but it suffered from a long development time, and was retired in 2005 before the Minuteman because of arms reduction treaties.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The first Peacekeeper ICBM was launched by Air Force Systems Command from an aboveground canister-type launch facility from Launch Complex TP-01 on 17 June 1983. This was the first "cold launch" of a missile at Vandenberg AFB, the missile reaching downrange. Two more test launches were conducted in 1983 from Launch Complex TP-01.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The first Peacekeeper with a Mark-21 test reentry vehicle was flight-tested from TP-01 on 15 June 1984. The Mark-21 resembled the reentry vehicle intended for the Peacekeeper weapon system. Two more test launches were conducted in 1984, the missile from TP-01. Air Force Systems Command conducted the final Peacekeeper launch from the aboveground TP-01 launch pad on 30 June 1985.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The first silo launch from LF-05 took place on 24 August 1985 from LF-08. LF-02 began to be used in 1986 for additional launches. On 23 August 1986 the first launch of a completely operational hardware configured missile and launch facility, and also the first Peacekeeper launch by a SAC combat crew under the control of Air Force Systems Command took place from silo LF-02.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: A new Peacekeeper Missile Procedures Trainer was dedicated in March 1987. The US$17 million facility featured a state-of-the-art computer based simulator which would be used to train and evaluate missile crew members. The first LGM-118 Peacekeepers were deployed to Francis E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming that year. LGM-118 Peacekeeper test launches continued from Vandenberg with a third silo, LF-05 becoming operational in March 1990. The final launch of a LGM-118 Peacekeeper 33PA took place on 21 July 2004 before the missile was retired from service.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The latest missile deployed at Vandenberg in 2005 is the Ground-based Interceptor (GBI) missile suborbital booster for the U.S. Missile Defense Agency's Ground-based Midcourse Defense system's EKV ballistic missile kill vehicle. It is part of a National missile defense system advocated by president George W. Bush. The OBV is under development by Orbital Sciences; for every interceptor missile there is a missile silo and a Silo Interface Vault (SIV), which is an underground electronics room adjacent to the silo. The basic OBV consists of the upper three stages and guidance system from the Taurus orbital launch vehicle (essentially a wingless Pegasus-XL). The developmental OBV is launched from an open pad; the operational version is to be silo-launched.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The first test firing of the OVB took place from former Atlas-F pad 576-E on 6 February 2003. Launch silo LF-23 is used for ongoing silo testing, with target missiles consisting of surplus inert Minuteman ICBM second and third stages being launched from the Kwajalein Meck launch site in the Pacific Range.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The world's first polar orbit satellite, Discoverer 1, launched from Vandenberg on 28 February 1959. The launch vehicle for this mission consisted of a Thor-Agena combination. The Discoverer series of satellites provided other significant firsts for Vandenberg. For instance, in August 1960, the data capsule was ejected from Discoverer XIII in orbit and recovered from the Pacific Ocean to become the first man-made object ever retrieved from space. A week later, on 19 August 1960, the descending capsule from Discoverer XIV was snared by an aircraft in flight for the first air recovery in history. Shrouded in a cover story of scientific research, Discoverer was actually the cover name for CORONA, America's first photo reconnaissance satellite program. The publicized Discoverer series came to an end on 13 January 1962 after 38 launches (or launch attempts).


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: Over the years, unmanned satellites of every description and purpose, including international satellites, were placed in orbit from Vandenberg by a widening variety of boosters. Among the parade of newer space boosters are the Titan IV (March 1991), Taurus (March 1994), Pegasus (April 1995), Delta II (February 1996), Atlas IIAS (December 1999), Minotaur (2000), and beginning in late 2005, the Falcon 1, the Delta IV, and Atlas V vehicles.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The most ambitious Air Force endeavors at Vandenberg were the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) and the Space Shuttle programs. The MOL vehicle consisted of a Titan III booster carrying a modified Gemini space capsule (Gemini B) attached to a space laboratory. Construction work for MOL began at Space Launch Complex-6 (SLC-6) on South Vandenberg in March 1966. President Richard Nixon canceled the estimated US$3 billion program in June 1969, as a result of cost overruns, completion delays, emerging new technologies, and the expense of fighting the Vietnam War. SLC-6 remained closed for the next decade.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: In 1972, Vandenberg was selected as the West Coast Space Shuttle launch and landing site, but it was never used as such.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: Space Launch Complex-6 (SLC-6, pronounced as "Slick Six"), originally built for the abandoned Manned Orbital Laboratory project, was extensively modified for shuttle operations. Over US$4 billion was spent on the modifications to the complex and construction of associated infrastructure. The original Mobile Service Tower (MST) was lowered in height and two new flame ducts were added for the shuttle's solid rocket boosters. Additional modifications or improvements, included liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen storage tanks, a payload preparation room, payload changeout room, a new launch tower with escape system for the shuttle crewmembers, sound suppression system and water reclamation area and a Shuttle Assembly Building were added to the original complex.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The existing 8,500-foot (2,590 m) runway and overruns on the North Base flightline were lengthened to 15,000 feet (4,580 m) to accommodate end-of-mission landings, along with construction of the Precision Approach Path Indicator (PAPI) lights/large triangle arrows at both ends of the runway. Turn-around servicing and refurbishing of the Space Shuttle orbiter would be accomplished in the adjacent Orbiter Maintenance and Checkout Facility (OMCF). The Mate-Demate Facility, to load and unload the Orbiter from the Boeing 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA), was changed from the large structure found at Dryden Flight Research Center and Kennedy Space Center, to a transportable "erector set-like" Orbiter Lifting Frame (OLF). This facility design change was due to the possibility of needing to support a landing at a location where there was no facility to load the Orbiter onto the SCA. The OLF could be disassembled, loaded onto two C-5 aircraft, shipped to the overseas Orbiter landing site, and reassembled to load the Orbiter onto the Boeing 747. To transport the Orbiter from the OMCF (on North Vandenberg AFB) to SLC-6, the route was upgraded to accommodate a 76-wheeled vehicle, built by Commetto in Italy specifically to carry the Orbiter on its large flat deck utilizing the three external tank interface points, versus towing the Orbiter on its landing gear that long distance.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: Modification of SLC-6 to support polar missions had been problematic and expensive. SLC-6 was still being prepared for its first Shuttle launch, mission STS-62-A targeted for 15 October 1986, when the "Challenger" disaster grounded the Shuttle fleet and set in motion a chain of events that finally led to the decision to cancel all west coast shuttle launches. The orbiter transporter was sent to Kennedy Space Center in Florida after the Vandenberg AFB launch site was abandoned and was used to transport the Orbiter from the Orbiter Processing Facility to the Vehicle Assembly Building.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: Persistent site technical problems and a joint decision by the Air Force and NASA to consolidate Shuttle operations at the Kennedy Space Center, following the Challenger disaster in 1986, resulted in the official termination of the Shuttle program at Vandenberg on 26 December 1989.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: Had the space shuttle program been successful at SLC-6, the West Coast operation would have contrasted with that at the Kennedy Space Center by creating the orbiter stack directly on the launch pad, rather than assembling it and then moving it. Three movable buildings on rails, the Launch Tower, Mobile Service Building and Payload Changeout Room were used to assemble the Shuttle orbiter, external tank and SRBs. These buildings were designed to protect the shuttle "stack" from high winds in the area and were used during a series of "fit tests" utilizing the space shuttle "Enterprise" in 1985.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: Since the demise of the shuttle program at Vandenberg, SLC-6 was once again reconfigured, this time to support polar-orbit satellite launches by the new Delta IV family of launch vehicles, utilizing a Common Core Booster for class sizes all the way up to and including the Delta IV (Heavy) launcher. As it is currently configured, the launch site features structures similar to Boeing's Delta IV SLC-37 launch site at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, with a Fixed Umbilical Tower, Mobile Service Tower, Fixed Pad Erector, Launch Control Center and Operations Building, and a Horizontal Integration Facility. SLC-6 also features a Mobile Assembly Shelter that protects the rocket from adverse weather.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The first of the Delta IV launch vehicles to fly from SLC-6 successfully lifted off at 20:33 PDT on 27 June 2006 when a Delta IV Medium+ (4,2) rocket lofted NROL-22, a classified satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office, into orbit. The payload was successfully deployed approximately 54 minutes later.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The Atlas V was developed by Lockheed Martin as part of the United States Air Force (USAF) Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program. The Atlas V launches from Space Launch Complex-3E (SLC-3E). Lockheed Martin Commercial Launch Services markets the Atlas V to government and commercial customers worldwide.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The first Atlas V launch vehicle to fly from SLC-3E was launched on 19 March 2008 for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: SpaceX briefly used SLC-3W during the early development of the Falcon 1 launch vehicle, and later moved operations to Space Launch Complex 4-East (SLC-4E). SpaceX refurbished SLC-4E for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches, in a 24-month process that began in early 2011. The draft environmental impact assessment with a finding of "no significant impact" was published in February 2011. Demolition began on the pad's fixed and mobile service towers in summer 2011.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: By late 2012, SpaceX continued to anticipate that the initial launch from the Vandenberg pad would be in 2013, but would be a Falcon 9 launch — actually, a heavily modified and much larger Falcon 9 v1.1. As the pad was nearing completion in February 2013, the first Falcon 9 launch was scheduled for summer 2013 and was finally launched on 29 September 2013. This was the maiden flight of the Falcon 9 v1.1 evolution, carrying Canada's CASSIOPE satellite. In October 2018, SpaceX landed a Falcon 9 booster on a Vandenberg ground pad for the first time.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The Boeing X-37B, a reusable unmanned spacecraft operated by the Space Force, also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV), has landed at Vandenberg in the past. On 3 December 2010, the X-37B spaceplane successfully landed at the base after 224 days in space thus performing the first autonomous orbital landing onto a runway conducted by a U.S spacecraft. Since then, the X-37B has successfully landed on the 15,000-foot runway at Vandenberg two more times, on 16 June 2012 after 468 days in orbit and again on 14 October 2014 after 674 days in orbit. All of the X-37B missions thus far have been launched from Florida, the first four using expendable Atlas V rockets from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and the fifth on a reusable SpaceX Falcon 9 from Kennedy Space Center.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: On 14 May 2021, the base was renamed Vandenberg Space Force Base, in keeping with the expansion and standing up of the Space Force.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The host unit at Vandenberg SFB is the Space Launch Delta 30 (SLD 30; formerly known as 30th Space Wing, 30th SW). The SLD 30 is home to the Western Range, manages Department of Defense space and missile testing, and places satellites into near-polar orbits from the West Coast. Wing personnel also support the Air Force's Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Force Development Test and Evaluation program. The Western Range begins at the coastal boundaries of Vandenberg and extends westward from the California coast to the Western Pacific, including sites in Hawaii. Operations involve dozens of federal and commercial interests.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The delta is organized into operations, launch, mission support and medical groups, along with several directly assigned staff agencies.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The Space and Missile Heritage Center is located at Space Launch Complex 10, site of the first IRBM tests of the Thor and Discoverer (aka CORONA) spy satellite series of launches. It is Vandenberg's only National Historic Landmark that is open for regularly scheduled tours through the 30th Space Wing's Public Affairs office.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The Center preserves and displays artifacts and memorabilia to interpret the evolution of missile and spacelift activity at Vandenberg from the beginning of the Cold War through current non-classified developments in military, commercial, and scientific space endeavors.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The current display area is made up of two exhibits, the "Chronology of the Cold War" and the "Evolution of Technology". The exhibits incorporate a combination of launch complex models, launch consoles, rocket engines, re-entry vehicles, audiovisual and computer displays as well as hands-on interaction where appropriate. There are plans to evolve the center in stages from the current exhibit areas as restorations of additional facilities are completed.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: Units marked GSU are Geographically Separate Units, which although based at Vandenberg, are subordinate to a parent unit based at another location.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: Much of the base is rugged, mountainous, and undeveloped; predominant groundcover includes chaparral with coastal sage scrub and oak woodland. Because of its protected nature—none of the backcountry areas are open to the public or to any kind of development—the base contains some of the highest quality coastal habitat remaining in southern or central California. It is home to numerous threatened or endangered species, including Gambel's watercress ("Nasturtium gambellii"). The western terminus of the Santa Ynez Mountains is on the base, and is dominated by Tranquillion Peak, which rises above sea level. An optical tracking station is located at the top of the peak, which overlooks the various space launch complexes. The Amtrak Coast Starlight and Pacific Surfliner trains travel along the coast, providing a splendid view and one of the few ways for the public to see these remote areas. Conversely, State Route 1, California's Pacific Coast Highway, avoids these coastal protected areas and instead turns inland to serve the base's eastern side. The Breeze Bus provides service between the base, Santa Maria, and Lompoc.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: Surf Beach is open to the public, while Wall and Minuteman beaches are restricted to those with regular access to the base. Sections of these three beaches are closed between 1 March and 30 September every year during the nesting season of the Western Snowy Plover. The closures are in place to protect the bird under the Endangered Species Act. If a set number of trespass violations have been reached during any nesting season (50 for Surf, 10 for Wall, 10 for Minuteman), the beach is closed entirely.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: Surf Beach is adjacent to the Surf Amtrak station, just south of Ocean Beach Park, run by the Santa Barbara County Parks Division. On 22 October 2010, 19-year-old Lucas Ransom, a University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) student, was killed by a great white shark near Surf Beach. On 23 October 2012, 38-year-old Francisco Javier Solorio Jr. was killed by a shark near Ocean Beach.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: The United States Census Bureau has designated Vandenberg Space Force Base as a separate census-designated place (CDP) for statistical purposes, covering the base's residential population. Per the 2020 census, the population was 3,559. The CDP was formerly known as Vandenberg Air Force Base, reflecting the base's former name.


title: Vandenberg Space Force Base

text: "Note: the US Census treats Hispanic/Latino as an ethnic category. This table excludes Latinos from the racial categories and assigns them to a separate category. Hispanics/Latinos can be of any race."


title: Haplogroup R1b

text: It is the most frequently occurring paternal lineage in Western Europe, as well as some parts of Russia (e.g. the Bashkirs) and pockets of Central Africa (e.g. parts of Chad and among the Chadic-speaking minority ethnic groups of Cameroon). The clade is also present at lower frequencies throughout Eastern Europe, Western Asia, as well as parts of North Africa, South Asia and Central Asia.


title: Haplogroup R1b

text: R1b has two primary branches: R1b1-L754 and R1b2-PH155. R1b1-L754 has two major subclades: R1b1a1b-M269, which predominates in Western Europe, and R1b1b-V88, which is today common in parts of Central Africa. The other branch, R1b2-PH155, is so rare and widely dispersed that it is difficult to draw any conclusions about its origins. It has been found in Bahrain, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Ladakh, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Western China.


title: Haplogroup R1b

text: According to ancient DNA studies, most R1a and R1b lineages would have expanded from the Caspian Sea along with the Indo-European languages.