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I like your shot. You caught the rocket much earlier after lift off than I did. The nearby trees obstructed our early view and I had to rely on the youngsters to point me to it once it clearled the trees.

The following is from: New American engine allows Delta 4 to 'defeat gravity'

..."Nobody has ever developed an engine like this and done it in the amount time that Rocketdyne did. This is a great success and really the heart and soul of Delta 4 and what we are going to build our future on as far as our propulsion system."

...Driving the design of the RS-68 is cost. Keeping the expenses of producing the engine as low as possible will reduce the overall ticket to fly a satellite atop the Delta 4.

"The RS-68 is the first rocket engine designed specifically for low cost (to provide) affordable space-lift and worldwide commercial competitiveness," said Bryon Wood, the vice president and general manager of Rocketdyne.

Compared to the Space Shuttle Main Engine, development time for the RS-68 was cut in half, the number of parts was reduced by 80 percent, the hand-touched labor reduced by 92 percent and non-recurring costs were cut by a factor of five.

"We've been able to get a lot of hand-work out of the RS-68 and replaced it with numerically-controlled machines. So instead of having a thrust chamber built up of a lot of tubes, we've machined this thing out of a solid piece of metal, which increases reliability," Collins said.

"A lot of those advancements help make the engine a more economical engine to build. So I really think it is a good balance of higher reliability and lower life-cycle cost...