CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- This time they have to be perfect.
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Boeing Delta 3 rocket stands on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station ready to go on an $85 million mission with a dummy satellite to prove it is capable of delivering a payload into orbit.
At stake: the reputation of a commercial launch firm in danger of
losing revenue worth billions to overseas competitors.
Twice before this type of Delta 3 rocket has made the attempt with paying customers -- once in 1998 and once in 1999 -- and both missions failed. One satellite was left in pieces on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, another in a useless orbit.
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| A Delta 3 sits on a Cape launch pad early on Aug. 23, 2000.
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| The Western Atlantic Ocean imaged by GOES captured Hurricane Debby east of Cuba and Puerto Rico on Tuesday, August 22
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With two strikes against them, the Delta 3
launch team is eagerly awaiting the next pitch and a chance to show the entire aerospace community Boeing [BA] knows how to score a home run.
"I really feel the world is watching us," Jay Witzling, Boeing's vice president for the Delta 3 program, said Tuesday in Cocoa Beach. "We're looking good, we're confident and we're basically ready to go."
If everything does go according to plan, the launch promises to offer residents of Florida's Space Coast an unforgettable spectacle of fire and smoke, coming just four minutes after sunrise.
Liftoff is targeted for 7 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (11:00 GMT) on Wednesday. The launch window extends until 11 a.m. EDT (15:00 GMT) but, for technical reasons, once the rocket is loaded with its supercold propellant the Boeing team will only have about an hour or so to get off the ground.
Although
Hurricane Debby may threaten Florida's coastline by the weekend, Cape weather forecasts for Wednesday are generally acceptable, with a 70-percent chance of good conditions. Thick clouds and rain forming over the ocean and blowing in from the east are the main concerns.
Should some problem keep the Delta 3 on the ground the Boeing team likely would be able to try again on Thursday before having to stand down and prepare Launch Complex 17 for whatever Debby has in store, said Rich Murphy, Boeing's director of launch operations.
Flying the same path into space that the failed 1999 mission did, the rocket is to deliver its 9,500-pound (4,300-kilogram), cylinder-shaped satellite mock-up into orbit, where it is expected to remain for 15 to 20 years before reentering Earth's atmosphere.
More than just a simple block of steel and aluminum, the device was carefully constructed to behave exactly like a real communications satellite in terms of its weight, balance and the frequency at which it vibrates during launch, said Rick Aversen, Boeing's chief engineer for the Delta 3 program.
And as a science bonus, the inert payload was painted with black and white stripes and will be used as a target for ground-based optics, lasers and radar experiments operated by the U.S. Air Force and the University of Colorado.
"We're very pleased that we have been able to support the scientific community with this payload and we hope that it becomes a valuable asset over time for them to continue to use," Aversen said.
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The decision to fly this Delta 3 now with a simulated payload, rather than with a real satellite from a paying customer, was mostly a business decision, approved at the highest corporate levels of Boeing in Seattle, Witzling said.
Looking to see when any of the 18 satellites the Delta 3 has contracts to fly would be ready, none appeared to be ready to fly this year. At the same time, the company was having difficulty signing up new customers not only for its Delta 3, but for the Delta 4 rocket that shares much of the same design.
To remove any sense of uncertainty about the Delta 3's capability -- to "mitigate the
risk" as Witzling phrased it -- the company approved the idea of launching a dummy payload.
Industry analysts phrase the decision a different way: "They couldn’t get anybody to shell out money to pay," said Cai von Rumohr, an analyst at S.G. Cowen Securities in New York. "Nobody is going to go through with it until they have a success."
The notion that companies have shied away from putting a payload on the Delta 3 launch "is speculative, but it could be true because insurance is not sufficient to cover the risk," said Roger Rusch, president of TelAstra, a consulting firm in Palos Verdes Estates, California.
"Proven vehicles will average about a 10-percent
launch failure and new launch vehicles are at about 20 percent," Rusch said. "Two in a row is causing a lot of concern."
The
Delta failures cost Boeing about $450 million.
In addition, the company took a one-time, after-tax charge of $34 million in the second quarter of this year in anticipation of this week's Delta 3 launch. Boeing posted net earnings of $620 million, or $0.71 a share, compared to $701 million, or $0.75 per share, in the prior year.
So what happens if there is a third failure? The
Delta 3 program currently has contracts to launch 18 satellites, and many of those might decide they'd rather take their ride into orbit atop Lockheed Martin's Atlas, Europe’s Ariane or even Boeing’s own Sea Launch.
Boeing officials obviously don't want that to happen and say they won't quit if it does.
"If we do have a problem on this launch coming up, certainly we will be very disappointed as you can imagine. Clearly we'd need to figure out what it is," Witzling said. "We're committed to the program. We'd intend to find the problem, correct it and fly again. And we'll do that as quickly as we can."
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