CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Wed Jan 30, 2013 9:59pm EST

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - An unmanned Atlas 5 rocket blasted off on Wednesday to put the first of a new generation of NASA communications satellites into orbit, where it will support the International Space Station, the Hubble Space Telescope and other spacecraft.

The 191-foot (58-metre) rocket lifted off at 8:48 p.m. (0148 GMT Thursday), the first of 13 planned launches in 2013 from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station just south of NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

Once in position 22,300 miles above the planet, the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite, known as TDRS and built by Boeing Co, will join a seven-member network that tracks rocket launches and relays communications to and from the space station, the Hubble observatory and other spacecraft circling Earth.

Two other TDRS spacecraft were decommissioned in 2009 and 2011 respectively and shifted into higher "graveyard" orbits. A third satellite was lost in the 1986 space shuttle Challenger accident.

NASA used its space shuttle fleet for launching the satellites until 1995, then switched in 2000 to unmanned Atlas rockets, manufactured by United Space Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

With six operational satellites and a seventh spare, NASA can track and communicate with spacecraft in lower orbits, such as the space station, which flies about 250 miles above Earth.

Before 1983 when the first TDRS was launched, NASA relied on ground-based communications, occasionally supplemented with airplanes and ships, which was expensive to maintain and provided only a fraction of the coverage of an orbiting network.

Three second-generation TDRS spacecraft were launched from 2000 to 2002. Wednesday's launch was the first of three planned third-generation satellites needed to replace aging members of the constellation.

"It's been a long time since we launched the last one," NASA's TDRS project manager, Jeffrey Gramling, told reporters at a news conference before the launch.

Most of the spacecraft are well beyond their 10-year design life, he added.

Initially developed to support the space shuttle and space station programs, the TDRS network now serves a variety of NASA spacecraft and commercial users such as Space Exploration Technologies and foreign space agencies flying cargo ships to and from the station, a $100 billion research laboratory staffed by rotating crews of astronauts and cosmonauts.

The new spacecraft, which cost between $350 million and $400 million, will take about 10 days to reach its intended orbit. It will then go through a three-month checkout before it is put into service, Gramling said.

The 12th and 13th TDRS satellites are targeted for launch in 2014 and December 2015.

(Editing by Tom Brown and Peter Cooney)

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1 of 19. The Soyuz TMA-07M spacecraft carrying the International Space Station (ISS) crew of U.S. astronaut Thomas Marshburn, Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko and Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield blasts off from its launch pad at the Baikonur cosmodrome December 19, 2012.

ALMATY | Wed Dec 19, 2012 12:24pm EST

ALMATY (Reuters) - A Soyuz spacecraft carrying a Russian, an American and a Canadian blasted off on Wednesday to the International Space Station (ISS), where the men are to spend half a year in orbit.

The Russian-built Soyuz TMA-07M lifted off on time, at 1212 GMT, from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

On the crew's two-day trip to the ISS, Canadian Chris Hadfield is joined by U.S. astronaut Tom Mashburn and Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko.

They will join U.S. astronaut Kevin Ford and Russians Oleg Novitsky and Yevgeny Tarelkin, who have been manning the $100-billion, 15-nation research complex since October.

(Reporting by Dmitry Solovyov; Editing by Alison Williams)

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LOS ANGELES | Sat Oct 13, 2012 3:30pm EDT

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Brad Pitt has thrown his weight behind a documentary that blasts America's 40-year war on drugs as a failure, calling policies that imprison huge numbers of drug-users a "charade" in urgent need of a rethink.

The Hollywood actor came aboard recently as an executive producer of filmmaker Eugene Jarecki's "The House I Live In," which won the Grand Jury Prize in January at the Sundance Film Festival. The film opened in wide release in the United States on Friday.

Ahead of a Los Angeles screening, Pitt and Jarecki spoke passionately about the "War on Drugs" which, according to the documentary, has cost more than $1 trillion and accounted for over 45 million arrests since 1971, and which preys largely on poor and minority communities.

"I know people are suffering because of it. I know I've lived a very privileged life in comparison and I can't stand for it," Pitt told Reuters on Friday, calling the government's War on Drugs policy a "charade."

"It's such bad strategy. It makes no sense. It perpetuates itself. You make a bust, you drive up profit, which makes more people want to get into it," he added. "To me, there's no question; we have to rethink this policy and we have to rethink it now."

"The House I Live In" was filmed in more than 20 states and tells stories from many sides of the issue, including Jarecki's African-American nanny, a drug dealer, narcotics officer, inmate, judge, grieving mother, senator and others.

It also shows that although the United States accounts for only 5 percent of the world's population, it has 25 percent of its prison population. Additionally, African Americans, who make up roughly 13 percent of the population and 14 percent of its drug users, account for 56 percent of those incarcerated for drug crimes.

FILM GETS STRONG REVIEWS

The Los Angeles Times called the film "one of the most important pieces of nonfiction to hit the screen in years," while the Hollywood Reporter said it was a "potent cry for a drastic rethinking of America's War on Drugs" and that the film "should connect solidly with viewers at a moment when it seems possible to change public attitudes."

Pitt, who like his partner Angelina Jolie is no stranger to humanitarian and social causes, said that after seeing Jarecki's documentary, coupled with his own involvement with aiding the victims of Hurricane Katrina, he realized the U.S. government's war on drugs may not just be about drugs alone.

"That was an interesting premise for me," the "Moneyball" star told Reuters. "I hadn't thought about it in that matter (before seeing the film), but certainly what we witnessed after Katrina proved the idea had validity."

Some critics have attributed the slow response of the U.S. government to Katrina in 2005, and the devastating flooding of poor areas of New Orleans, to race and class issues.

Now, Pitt believes the War on Drugs is the greatest obstacle for impoverished parts of society, including African Americans, from getting ahead.

"It's a never-ending cycle. But then when you look at it after what we experienced with Katrina - this is Eugene's point and what he wanted to investigate - it is actually being used to cap a portion of our society and holding them back, shackling them," the actor said, adding that he signed on as executive producer to help promote the documentary.

Jarecki contrasted the justice system's attitude to bankers in the 2008 financial meltdown of Wall Street, who "got a slap on the hand," with its stance toward young drug-takers.

"A kid right now a block from here is going to have a cop find an ounce of something on his person and he's going spend 10 years in jail. These are all indicators of a society that has lost its way - and it has lost its way in the direction of injustice and unfairness," Jarecki told Reuters.

(Editing by Jill Serjeant and Eric Walsh)

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