sea_launch_000714 LONG BEACH, Calif.
Sea Launchs fourth launch from its floating platform in the equatorial Pacific will take place on July 28 when it sends a broadcast satellite into orbit in time to beam the summer Olympics to the Americas, Caribbean and western Europe.The launch will mark the international partnerships return to flight after a March 12 attempt ended in failure, destroying in the process an ICO F-1 communications satellite. Sea Launchs first two
launches, both in 1999, were successful."Its very important that we have a success," said Will Trafton, the companys president and general manager, during a press conference held on Thursday before Sea Launchs floating platform, the Odyssey, set sail. "We would be in a very difficult situation if we were to fail in two out of four tries."
Sea Launch will send this 601-HP communications satellite into orbit for PanAmsat.
The self-propelled Odyssey, with its crew of 70, will take 11 days to sail the 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) to where it will set up as a watery launch pad on the equator, located at 154 degrees west longitude or due south of Hawaii. The speedier Sea Launch Commander command ship, with 320 aboard, will leave Sunday to make the voyage.
There, at 6:42 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (22:42 GMT) on July 28, Sea Launch hopes to launch a 200-foot (60-meter) Zenit 3-SL rocket from the converted oil rig. The rocket will ferry an 8,000-pound (3,600-kilogram)
Hughes Space and Communications-built satellite into geosynchronous transfer orbit.(SPACE.com will cover the launch live, providing streaming video of liftoff.)
From a final geostationary orbit 22,500 miles (36,000 kilometers) above Earth, the PanAmSat 9 (PAS 9) satellite will replace the older PAS 5 and provide broadcast services to a wide swath of territory just in time for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.
Sea Launchs last mission ended in failure when faulty software allowed the rocket to launch with an open pneumatic system valve in its second stage.
"It was an error, a single line of code," said Thad Sandford, vice president of Boeing Space and Communications Group. Boeing is a 40-percent investor in Sea Launch.
The open valve allowed the loss of an excessive amount of
helium, preventing the rocket from reaching orbital velocity and eventually prompting the premature shutdown of the rockets second-stage engine, company officials said.The shutdown, nearly eight minutes after launch, sent the rocket and payload into the Pacific Ocean some 2,672 miles (4,300 kilometers) downrange from an altitude of 124 miles (200 kilometers). Nobody was hurt in the incident.
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Sea Launch officials stressed on Thursday the one-time nature of the deadly glitch.
"We have corrected the error and we have taken any and all measures to preclude such an error in the future," said Victor Legostaev, deputy chief executive of Sea Launch partner RKK Energia of Moscow.
Anglo-Norwegian Kvaerner Group of Oslo, Norway and SDO Yuzhnoye/PO Yuzhmash of Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine are the other two members of the international company.
The launch will be closely watched around the world. Onlookers include nervous insurers and future customers who have signed on for at least 19 more launches. The next launch, of another Hughes bird, is scheduled for September.
"The impression I get is there is a still a very positive image of Sea Launch in the industry. They had one failure but two successful launches before that. That probably says more than the failure. And if they figured out the problem, that goes a long way," said Marco Caceres, senior space analyst at the Teal Group in Fairfax, Virginia.
"Any launch vehicle thats gone through a major failure, if they can get back up in less than six months, thats good. If they have another failure, then you start to worry. Thats a lot," Caceres added.
Sea Launch lifts the DIRECTV 1-R satellite into orbit Oct. 9, 1999.
Sea Launch hopes to turn profitable in as little as three years time by ramping up to between six and eight launches annually, Trafton said. At present, the company boasts it can handle a 50-day turnaround between launches from its floating platform, which in a previous life was home to a North Sea oil-drilling rig.
The turnaround could shrink under tentative plans to carry a second Zenit aboard the Sea Launch Commander, which would be transferred to the Odyssey launch platform while at sea, eliminating the need to return to Long Beach.
But for now the focus is on the PAS 9 launch.
"Dont look back unless youre ready to go that way," Trafton said. "Were done looking back."
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