CAPE CANAVERAL - Boeing's
Delta 4 rocket is poised to return to flight this week for the first time in a
year and a half, and there's more riding on the launch than the weather
satellite on top.
"Much of our workload
is handled by the Delta fleet, and we've been down for a bit," said Col.
Ed Bolton, who took over the Air Force's rocket-launching operations in
December and is looking to get the over-budget and behind-schedule program back
on track.
Job 1: the military needs a
flightworthy Delta 4. One sure way to re-establish the rocket's reliability is
to successfully launch and deliver to orbit the GOES-N
weather satellite this week.
Boeing's
Delta 4 is one of two rockets available to the government under the Evolved
Expendable Launch Vehicle program, and it's the one assigned to launch most of
the U.S. military and spy satellites.
The vehicle last got off
the ground in December 2004, with the flawless
liftoff of the brutish, heavy version of the Delta 4, one of the most
powerful rockets ever to launch from Cape Canaveral.
The only problem: the
rocket didn't
quite work.
A fuel-sensor
glitch caused the rocket's three first-stage engines to stop running before
they should have, and the upper stage could not make up the difference.
Two university science
spacecraft were lost and the military's payload, a weight simulator called
DemoSat, was dropped off 10,000 miles short of orbit. Had it been a real
spacecraft, it would have been rendered useless space junk.
Boeing and the Air Force
deemed the launch a "success," despite the fact that it failed to
meet the fundamental goal of getting the payload to the targeted orbit.
But this was a test flight,
and prime among the goals was data-collection.
The team got lots of data
about the performance of the new rocket and they say the data helped them solve
the fuel-sensor problem.
For 18 months, however, no
Delta 4 has flown.
Another problem with the
rocket's propellant
system arose.
Then, batteries used to
power the Deltas' safety-destruct system had to be replaced fleetwide.
Questions later arose about
the strength of a bonding and filling material used -- sort of like tile grout
-- on some parts of the rocket. Several lesser technical issues also were
found.
Then, last fall, as
progress started to be made toward returning the Delta 4 to launch status,
hundreds of Boeing rocket machinists walked off the
job in a dispute over pay and benefits.
In the case of almost every
mission on Delta's manifest, work came to a screeching halt.
"That really hampered
our ability to get work done on the pads," Bolton said. "Boeing has
done a good job getting that negotiation done."
The problems with the Delta
4 came at troublesome times for the company and for the military rocket program.
First, Boeing faced a
brewing scandal and federal investigations into its employees' illegally
obtaining secret Lockheed Martin documents to gain an unfair advantage in the
bidding for early launches.
The charges, part of a
larger contracting-fraud investigation that Boeing this week said it is willing
to pay $615 million to settle, led the Air Force to move $1 billion worth of
launches from the Delta 4 to the rival Lockheed Martin Atlas 5.
Moreover, the government's
total investment in the two rockets has grown from an estimated $17 billion to
more than $32 billion since its inception.
Part of that increase is
because of a crash in the commercial space-launch market that forced the
Defense Department to increase taxpayer subsidies to the two rocket fleets.
Those subsidies included everything from cash to help pay bills at launch sites
on both coasts to increased launch fees the companies charge for each mission.
Still, on a per-launch
basis, the program is meeting its goal of delivering launches for less than
they cost under previous programs like Titan 4.
The other rocket in the
military's program, Atlas 5, has flown several commercial and NASA missions
during the Delta's grounding.
A slate of communications
and intelligence satellites assigned to Deltas, however, have been stuck on the
ground along with the GOES-N weather satellite, which is scheduled to launch no
earlier than between 6:11 p.m. and 7:11 p.m. EDT (2011-2311 GMT) Wednesday.
Now, it's time to get them
into space so they'll be ready when needed in years to come, Bolton said.
"We look at it as
return to flight," Bolton said.
The coming flights of the
Delta 4 also take on added importance because of NASA's recent
decision to use the rocket's RS-68 engines (rather than the shuttles' main
engines) for the cargo launcher for missions to the moon and Mars.
Thus, every flight of the
Delta 4 becomes an opportunity to learn more about the engines and reduce the
risk to those future exploration missions.
Bolton's optimistic the
Delta 4 flight pace is going to become more steady.
"We're going from a
launch rate of zero a month for more than a year" to five launches between
now and July 20, he said.
The next heavy version of
the Delta 4 could fly as soon as January.
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