FLUG REVUE October 2002: US EELVs challenge Ariane

EELV: ATLAS V AND DELTA IV ATTACK ARIANE

By Matthias Gründer

Atlas V lifts off

The story of the EELV programme is somewhat complicated. When the space shuttle Challenger exploded in a giant fireball shortly after lift-off on 28 January 1986, the USA lost not only seven astronauts but one of its four reusable orbiters. With the grounding of the remaining shuttle fleet imposed after the catastrophe, overnight NASA and the military lost all their satellite launching capacity for an unforeseeable time, yet in the expectation of high launch frequencies and low costs the Reagan administration had only three years earlier taken the decision to concentrate the entire transport requirement exclusively on the shuttles. No further contracts for conventional rockets were awarded, and those already built were not replaced once they had been used. All at once the USA was barred access to space.

Between 1987 and 1990 NASA and the Pentagon therefore initiated a joint Advanced Launch System programme. This was followed in 1991/92 by the National Launch System programme and finally in 1993 by the Spacelifter programme. All these programmes had the same ambitious aims of rapidly supplementing the USA's existing depleted arsenal of elderly launcher rockets with new models, modernising it to meet the more exacting demands of the next century and adapting it to the tough conditions of transporting both scientific and security-relevant and also commercial payloads. Another objective was to reduce costs considerably in order, above all, to stay in the running against the international competition in the lucrative commercial satellite market.

The main competitor the politicians and the military had in their sights was the European launch service provider Arianespace, but they were also worried about Russian and Chinese organisations, which used the forced pause in the American programme to become established on the market. But none of the three programmes produced the desired success. This was due to mistakes in management and financial bottlenecks, and especially to fundamental differences regarding the numbers, mass and size of the satellites to be launched and hence over the configuration of the launchers that were needed.

As a way out of the muddled situation, Congress therefore asked the Pentagon in 1993 to come up with a modernisation plan containing clearly defined objectives, priorities and dates. By this time the shuttles were flying again, but the effects of the Challenger disaster were still being felt and, as before, the US launch capacity in the area of "throwaway rockets” continued to be based on obsolete and overly expensive models, on whose shoulders weighed virtually all commercial and governmental orders.

A modernisation study published in 1994 outlined four basic options for reducing launch costs as rapidly as possible: use of the existing technology including the most urgently needed upgrades, further development of the best systems around at the time, development of a completely new launcher or development of a reusable space transport system. After careful deliberation, the Pentagon experts decided on the second option as the one which would produce the biggest cost savings in the shortest possible time. It was thus that the EELV programme came into being in the late autumn of 1994. Built into the target planning was the requirement that Air Force Space Command should achieve a mandatory reduction in launch costs of at least 25% and up to 50%.

This was to be accomplished by concentrating launches previously carried out using Atlas, Delta and Titan launch vehicles on a new, modularly designed family of launch vehicles which were to be produced and operated by a single supplier. The military believed that centralisation alone would make enormous savings possible in the costs of an infrastructure which at the time comprised no less than eleven launch sites, five launch teams and three production companies. Accordingly, four identical studies aimed at defining a launch vehicle concept were commissioned by the Air Force in August 1995, each allocated $20 million of funding.

At the end of 1996, the competition was narrowed down to two suppliers, McDonnell Douglas Aerospace and Lockheed Martin Astronautics, who were commissioned to start a 17-month development phase. It is an irony of fate that, after failing to make the last two in the competition, Boeing suddenly found itself back in the running following its takeover of competitor MDD in August 1997. Boeing and Lockheed each received $60 million from the USAF to define their system configuration and finalise their cost calculations.

The plan was that in the summer of 1998 one of the two competitors would then be awarded a development contract worth $1.6 billion based on its concept. This contractor would be required to carry out an operational launch in each of the medium and upper payload class (without test flights), organise production and build two launch complexes, in Cape Canaveral and Vendenberg. Meanwhile the Air Force was planning to award between 25 and 30 launch contracts worth about $1.5 billion by 2005.

In 1997 the Pentagon was still working on the assumption that the government would require 193 launches by 2020, but this assumption was soon to be revised downwards. Boeing and Lockheed Martin for their part were both expecting between 10 and 20 orders per year, of which about half would come from the commercial sector. As a result, the configuration of the launch vehicles financed by the Department of Defense was suddenly determined by the market and no longer by the real sponsor.

It also turned out that the two suppliers would have been able to make a profit from their programmes even without the government orders, and that even with a higher number of launch orders, they needed to retain sufficient capacity to simultaneously survive on the commercial market. The result of this was that the Pentagon moved away from its earlier insistence on a single supplier and now gave equal support to both competitors.

If there had ever been any doubts as to the correctness of this decision, these were finally dispelled by 11 September 2001, when it became clear that a terrorist attack on the production lines of a single manufacturer or on its launch facilities would have once again grounded America's space ambitions for a lengthy period, rendering it powerless.

And so it went on. As there was now no competition, the two rival companies were freed from the pressure to produce defined successes to a tight schedule and, in an unusual show of unity, the customers, i.e. the US government and the commercial satellite operators, awarded equal numbers of launch contracts to both companies. Lockheed Martin set up the International Launch Services joint venture to market its Atlas family of launch vehicles, and this year Boeing followed suit with the establishment of Boeing Launch Services for its Delta family. In the meantime the first Atlas V launch has now taken place, to be shortly followed by the first Delta IV launch. America finally has some good, reasonably priced launchers in its arsenal.

From page 40 of FLUG REVUE 10/2002

Last updated 12 September 2002

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