McDonnell Douglas to Launch Delta II Rocket

HUNTINGTON BEACH — McDonnell Douglas Corp. said Wednesday that it will launch its first Delta II rocket since January, when one of its rockets failed in an Air Force mission.

The company said it plans to launch five Iridium system telecommunications satellites from Vandenberg Air Force Base, kicking off an aggressive five-year program.

McDonnell Douglas expects to launch about a dozen satellites this year and an average of more than one satellite a month from Vandenberg or Cape Canaveral, Fla., through 2002.”We’re not fully booked up,” spokesman Keith Takahashi said, “but we’re busy.”

The Iridium system is designed as a constellation of 66 satellites in low Earth orbit to provide a wireless personal communications network worldwide by late next year.

The company is benefiting from tremendous growth in the commercial telecommunications industry, Takahashi said, but it also has a number of launches scheduled for military and scientific satellites.

The company’s Huntington Beach space unit handles engineering, administration and initial manufacturing of the Delta IIs. Final assembly is in Pueblo, Colo. Typically, an average launch raises $50 million in revenue, an industry source said.

The launches this month will be the first since the Jan. 17 failure of a Delta II during a U.S. Air Force launch of a Global Positioning System satellite from Cape Canaveral. Last month, the Air Force issued a press release stating that a split in the casing of a solid rocket motor caused the failure.