U.S. Navy photo by Leah Garton (2048×1366)
Sailors on the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Hopper (DDG-70) conduct two developmental flight tests of the Standard Missile-3 Block IB Threat Upgrade guided missile off the coast of Hawaii.
“The flight tests demonstrated the successful performance of design modifications to the SM-3 third-stage rocket motor nozzle.”
Incidentally, this particular Burke is only the second U.S. Navy warship to be named for a woman, after computer scientist Rear Admiral “Amazing” Grace Hopper, who earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale in 1934, was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer in 1944 (where she literally had to debug the huge device of moths), went on to craft validation software for COBOL, etc.
She was so valuable that, even though she was officially retired at age 60 as per regs, she was recalled and remained on active duty for several years by special approval of Congress, finally mustering out at age 79 and change.
