Dormant for more than 18 years, a state-run launch complex is set to roar back to life with Friday’s planned late-night blastoff by a Minotaur rocket flying from Florida for the first time.

Two decades ago, officials stood up a new pad on the tip of Cape Canaveral hoping to capture some of an anticipated surge in commercial launches of small satellites.

The surge never came: Launch Complex 46 hosted just two missions, in 1998 and 1999, before going quiet.

Still, leaders of the project at the time say those missions helped pave the way for today’s Cape, showing missions could launch more affordably and not entirely under federal government control.

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“I believe we had the vision of the future, but the timing was a little off,” said Ed O’Connor, former head of the Spaceport Florida Authority, a precursor to Space Florida.

The pad’s time has come again in 2017.

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Orbital ATK’s solid-fueled Minotaur IV rocket, which repurposes a deactivated Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missile for its first three stages, is targeting liftoff during a four-hour window opening at 11:15 p.m. Friday.

The 78-foot rocket is carrying a small Air Force surveillance satellite that from low Earth orbit will track critical spacecraft flying in orbits much higher over the equator.

In early 2019, NASA plans to use the pad to test of the abort system that would enable astronauts in Orion capsules to escape a failing rocket.

No more flights are confirmed from Launch Complex 46 after that, but Space Florida hopes this Minotaur mission is the first of more to come, after Orbital ATK years ago chose Virginia as the launch site for its larger Antares rocket.

“This marks a real return of (Orbital ATK) to the Cape,” Space Florida President and CEO Frank DiBello told board members this week. “We’re very proud of that.”

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In addition, the pad could potentially host any of several new rockets being developed to launch small satellites, if that long-hyped market materializes.

Twenty years ago, the Cape was seen as a more difficult place for commercial launches, whose schedules were at the mercy of higher-priority government missions.

With Launch Complex 46, O'Connor said the state sought to “rock the boat a little,” emphasizing less overhead and lower-cost operations.

“The early vision was to kind of open it up, so it would be different than the standard government launch site,” said the 78-year-old Cocoa resident, a retired Air Force colonel who in 1986 led NASA's recovery of the shuttle Challenger.

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The Navy agreed to share the complex it had used for land-based test launches of ballistic missiles that were moved offshore to submarines.

The state invested about $7 million to outfit the pad with a nearly 140-foot mobile service tower and mounts fitting rockets from Lockheed Martin, Orbital Sciences and ATK.

On Jan. 7, 1998, Lockheed’s Athena rocket lifted off from the site with a NASA probe on a mission that searched for water ice on the moon.

A year later, another Athena lifted off with a Republic of China satellite, Rocsat-1.

That was that for Launch Complex 46, but O’Connor said the missions were symbolically significant.

“It showed that it didn’t all have to be controlled by the federal government,” he said. “Lunar Prospector demonstrated that a private entity could do something dramatic and at lower cost.”

At the time, O’Connor projected at least four launches a year from Complex 46.

Though it didn’t happen there, he said the business concept the site embodied has finally gained wider acceptance.

“I think to a large measure that established the appropriateness of the approach,” he said of the two launches. “It’s just, the space industry moves slow. It takes a while for it all to sink in.”

In recent years, SpaceX has brought commercial satellite launches back to Cape Canaveral. The Air Force has welcomed Blue Origin and Moon Express to set up shop on its turf. NASA has given companies responsibility for launching cargo and eventually astronauts to the International Space Station, and commercial rocket and satellite factories are springing up at Kennedy Space Center.

Launch Complex 46 , active only briefly, was a step toward that future.

“We hoped for more launches than occurred from there, but that wasn’t the goal,” said O’Connor. “The demonstration part has worked exceptionally well, and it was a very minor investment. If you look at it in that framework, 46 did its job.”

Contact Dean at 321-242-3668 orjdean@floridatoday.com. And follow on Twitter at@flatoday_jdeanand on Facebook atfacebook.com/jamesdeanspace.