Vandenberg Launch Has Officials on Tightrope

The only thing roaring louder than the Titan IV rocket set for blastoff here after midnight tonight might be the nerves of America’s military and aerospace establishment.

Trepidation about the launch has peaked because the Titan IV--the nation’s prime vehicle to put military and spy satellites into space--has blown up or misfired three times in a row since August.

Other rockets launched for the private sector have not fared much better--also failing three times in nine months in attempts to put two communications satellites and one Earth-imaging satellite into proper orbit.

The government and its contractors do not know what has caused the rockets to explode or fizzle before delivering their payloads into space. But concern is so great that President Clinton this week requested Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and the administrators of the CIA and NASA to report on the failures and on “actions required to ensure our future access to space.”

NASA, “caught up in this whole swirl of concern,” has put a hold on several launches, an agency spokesman said. National security has not yet been compromised by the failure to put spy satellites in space, Defense Department officials said. But one official conceded that the government and its contractors might have “clipped some corners” in attempting to rush a new and cheaper breed of rockets into space.

“I think we have a crisis, but I also think we have our best minds on this,” Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre told an audience of defense specialists recently. “We’ve had three or four years of significant consolidation and turmoil within the industry. We are trying to bring several new systems online.

“There has been no common thread between all the failures and that is one thing that points to a management problem,” Hamre said. “It is a shared management problem between government and industry.”

Officials with Lockheed Martin Corp., maker of the Titan IV, and the Air Force said they welcome the launch from the base here on the Central California coast. A giant Titan IV, second in size in the United States only to the space shuttle, is scheduled to lift off between midnight and 4 a.m. Saturday to put a spy satellite into polar orbit.

Military and corporate leaders predicted that the launch will reestablish what has for the last year been a fragile link with space.

“Our track record over the last year has not been acceptable to us or to our customers,” said Peter B. Teets, Lockheed Martin’s president and chief operating officer. The failures have been a “huge disappointment” that has been unsettling to morale, Teets said. But he added that the rocket maker is “very diligently prepared for this Saturday morning launch.”

Officers at Vandenberg said Thursday that they would end the string of Titan mishaps that have occurred over Cape Canaveral in Florida.

“We’re ready to go. We’re not nervous,” said Air Force Col. Ed Bolton, who is in charge of clearing Vandenberg and the surrounding region for the launch. “Eight minutes into this thing, when the payload [satellite] separates, our job is done.”

The Air Force base’s spokesmen acknowledge, however, that all the extra attention has made the launch more than business as usual. “Everyone expects us to do it right,” said Lt. Tom Knowles. “No pressure at all, huh?”

3 Generations of Rockets

Americans have come to take for granted telecommunications services available around the world; and, no less, to assume that the government’s spy cameras enjoy an unobstructed view of potential enemies. But those technologies are dependent on satellites. And putting satellites in space remains a risky venture. A handful of rockets in every hundred is expected to fail.

The challenge has increased in recent years as the government and private companies have demanded cheaper and more frequent transportation into space, experts say.

“My sense is that the contractors are really stretched thin right now,” said John Willacker of The Aerospace Corp., an El Segundo-based research and development contractor. Both Lockheed Martin and Boeing have been juggling three generations of rockets, perhaps leaving insufficient time to focus on each, Willacker said. “They are fighting to beat each other for the business on the commercial vehicles, with the government waiting to buy its way on board. The events of the last several months have made people uneasy and got them reexamining all of this.”

The series of failures began in August when a Lockheed-made Titan IV exploded less than a minute after liftoff from Cape Canaveral. A spy satellite valued at nearly $1 billion went up in smoke.

An expert panel found that faulty wiring detonated the rocket’s highly volatile fuel. The same type of rocket failed two more times this April, the first when an upper stage didn’t properly separate and the second when software problems led to another upper stage misfire. (The upper stages were made by other contractors, although Lockheed oversaw both missions.)

Interspersed between those incidents was the loss of two Boeing Delta III rockets and a Lockheed Martin Athena II, all of which destroyed or crippled private satellites. One of the spacecraft would have taken pictures to make maps so finely detailed, as one expert put it, “you could draw in what was on your neighbor’s barbecue.”

The string of rocket mishaps is not unprecedented. In the six months before and after the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986, the United States also lost virtually every type of rocket in its arsenal. The nation was forced to take its longest hiatus from launches since the beginning of the Space Age. It could not put a military satellite in orbit for more than a year.

Independent reviews of the recent string of accidents have been launched by Lockheed Martin, Boeing and the Air Force.

Willacker said six failures in such rapid succession almost certainly involves more than chance because the rockets typically succeed more than 90% of the time.

“There must be a thread between them,” Willacker said. “The chance of having this many 2% or 3% occurrences in a row just boggles the mind.”

Henry Hertzfeld, a senior research scientist at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, said: “There is a big push: better, faster, cheaper. Are all the necessary redundancies still there? . . . I don’t know and I think it is much too early to say.”

Quality Control Concerns

John Pike, director of space policy for the Federation of American Scientists, said concurrent problems with an antimissile system being tested by Lockheed hint at a wider problem within the company. The system, known as THAAD, has missed all six times that it has been fired at live targets. “There is some sort of quality control problem there,” Pike said.

Teets rejected that argument, noting that his company has successfully launched 43 Atlas rockets in a row. He said the THAAD missile system is still in its developmental stages and therefore should not be used to draw comparisons with more established rocket programs such as the Titan or Atlas.

Confidence in the pending Titan IV launch is enhanced because the rocket does not include an upper stage like either of the two that failed this spring over Cape Canaveral. In addition, Lockheed officials insist that they have corrected the wiring problem that caused the explosion nine months ago.

Still, Willacker said good science sometimes can use a boost. He recently spoke to an old friend who works on the Titan IV for Lockheed and gave him some advice for the Vandenberg launch.

“I said it would be a really good idea if you could get in touch with the Chumash medicine man up there,” Willacker said. “I may not be superstitious, but I do believe in being careful.”