Virginia Firm Uses a B-52 to Launch Satellites : Aerospace: The launch is considered a breakthrough for private enterprise, which hopes to tap the lucrative rocket business.

A pair of military satellites were successfully launched into orbit Thursday by an innovative unmanned rocket that was launched after being dropped from a B-52 flying 43,000 feet over the Pacific some 62 miles west of Big Sur.

It was the first time that a payload had been launched into space orbit from a plane, and the flight marked a stunning success for Orbital Sciences Corp., a small Fairfax, Va., company that was hired by the Pentagon to hoist the satellites into orbit.

Lt. Col. Edward Nicastri, who was in charge of the flight for the government and viewed the flight from Edwards Air Force Base, called it “a total success.”

Orbital Sciences is one of a handful of entrepreneurial companies trying to make a go of it in the small commercial rocket launch business.

There was a lot riding on Orbital Sciences’ first flight, named Pegasus after the winged horse of Greek mythology. Two of the three previous launch attempts in the past 14 months by two other small American firms had ended in failure.

Orbital Sciences and its partner, Hercules Aerospace, had spent $50 million in research and development costs for their first launch. And last month Orbital Sciences was forced to postpone a $16-million initial public stock offering after a Wall Street Journal story detailed the perils of the small-rocket industry.

“We said we would do it and we did it,” said David Thompson, Orbital Sciences’ co-founder and chief executive after the launch. “This has been a 3-year-long crusade for our company.”

Unlike conventional vertical rocket launchers that lift off from a launch pad, Orbital Sciences saves the expense of using a major rocket booster by having a plane carry the rocket into the air.

The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency paid Orbital Sciences $6.5 million for the launch, and NASA provided the B-52. The government has already signed up for four other Orbital Sciences launches and is excited about the Pegasus program because of the mobile, low-cost rocket launch system that could put small intelligence satellites into space quickly during wartime.

The next Pegasus flight, which will carry seven small satellites into orbit, is set for some time this summer.

The Swedish government has also tentatively signed up with Orbital Sciences to launch a scientific satellite in December, 1992.

Thursday’s launch borrowed heavily from the launch concept used in the military’s X-15 experimental airplane that set many speed and altitude records during the 1960s. The X-15 was also carried into the air by a B-52, the same plane that carried the Pegasus rocket aloft.

The 41,500-pound, 49-foot Pegasus rocket was attached like a bomb under the B-52’s right wing, and at 12:10 p.m., the rocket was released over the Pacific. Five seconds later, the first of three engine stages ignited, and the rocket left behind a white plume of exhaust as it began to climb into space.

Gordon Fullerton, a former space shuttle astronaut, piloted the B-52 loaded with the Pegasus. He said that when the rocket’s first engine ignited, “It was really impressive. It looked like a little shuttle launch heading for the sky.”

Twelve minutes later the 422-pound payload reached orbit 320 nautical miles above the Earth. One NASA satellite attached in the third stage of the rocket collected data on the flight and will later release a chemical experiment into space. A second Navy communications satellite was also released into orbit.

Before the flight, Peter Glaser, a space expert with consulting firm Arthur D. Little in Cambridge, Mass., said of Orbital Sciences: “If they have success with that design, it will be a real technical advance. They are reaching out to a totally novel technology.”

In the days before the rocket launch, though, aerospace observers including Glaser wondered whether the Pegasus would fly as planned because during the first stage of the flight it would be guided by fins at the rear of the craft. During the first stage of flight the rocket hit 5,800 miles per hour, a speed so fast that no air tunnel could simulate it.

So Orbital Sciences engineers had to rely on computer flight simulations for their rocket design. But Thompson said the rocket’s successful flight “was not the result of luck.”

Not everything on the Pegasus was as innovative. The engines, built by Hercules, were similar to ones already used in rockets built by Martin Marietta and McDonnell Douglas.

The market for small rocket companies developed after the space shuttle Challenger accident in 1986 and the government opened the way for private commercial rocket launchers.

Three major aerospace companies, Martin Marietta, McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics--which have built ballistic missiles for decades--have lined up dozens of commercial customers who want to launch satellites weighing as much as 5,000 pounds.

But if the big three rocket companies are like huge moving vans and can charge $130 million for a launch, the smaller firms such as Orbital Sciences are more like Federal Express, hoping to deliver smaller packages up to 1,000 pounds into space at a fraction of the cost.

Until Thursday’s flight though, the record of the small rocket companies was unimpressive. Last year. Space Services, a Houston company run by former Mercury astronaut Donald (Deke) Slayton, was the first firm to launch a rocket into space on a 15-minute suborbital flight. But a second launched last fall was a failure when the rocket’s guidance system went askew and the rocket was destroyed by remote control.

Another small rival, American Rocket Co. in Camarillo, suffered a humbling failure in October when its first launch attempt never got off the ground at Vandenberg Air Force Base. The rocket caught fire because of a faulty fuel valve, and since then the company has laid off two-thirds of its employees.

When Orbital Sciences completes its military launches, it will have to provide its own airplane. Some of its rivals doubt the company will be able to make good in its promise to provide orbital launches for between $7 million and $8 million.

But that is a problem for another day. For now Orbital Sciences is the only small rocket company with a perfect flight record.