^* However robust the system may have been, it did not entirely survive some very poor planning and decision making by a sister agency of the U.S. government, the Atomic Energy Commission. The navy’s Transit 4B satellite was launched in June 1961 and was sashaying quietly along its planned orbit, sending out its signals with impeccable regularity. However, a little more than a year later, the AEC launched a rocket with a powerful hydrogen bomb in its nose cone, which exploded as planned four hundred miles above Earth, near Hawaii. The AEC had forgotten to check, and it blew the poor little Transit out of the sky, one of several orbiting bodies that were damaged or destroyed that summer night. It also knocked out streetlights in Honolulu. Only the New Zealand Air Force was pleased, as the explosion lit up the South Pacific for a sufficient time to allow aircraft on exercise to find their target submarines. The exercise planners later claimed this was cheating.