The last three Titans are to launch from Florida and California during the next year or so. But the Titan 4 never quite delivered on a promise to offer the military a cheaper, reliable alternative to the shuttles for getting heavy military satellites to space. A single Titan ended up costing about as much as a shuttle mission anyway. And while 30 of 34 Titan 4s did their jobs flawlessly, the four that did not left billions of dollars of critical military satellites at the bottom of the ocean or in the wrong orbit -- basically space junk.
Roger Guillemette, an independent military space analyst who recently wrote a history of the Titans, said his first reaction to the end of the Titan 4 is "good riddance." But he and others also recall the workhorse booster's mighty contribution to space exploration and national security.
Awesome raw power
The current model is a brute -- capable of lifting 50,000 pounds, or about 16 Volkswagen Beetles, to orbit.
"The Titan has been been the premier provider of services for them, for the defense of our country," said Ben Dusenbery of Merritt Island, the local Titan manager for Lockheed Martin.
Titans began as intercontinental ballistic missiles, topped with nuclear weapons.
Then came Titan 2, used to boost critical Gemini missions in which NASA proved many techniques such as spacewalking and docking in orbit -- all of which needed to be mastered to get men to the Moon during Project Apollo.
Later, Titans launched the twin Voyager flights to the outer reaches of the solar system and the Viking probes that landed on Mars.
After the Challenger disaster in 1986, President Reagan decided to limit the use of the shuttles for that job, hurrying devlopment of the Titan 4 as the only way to get those assets to space.
The heavy military and intelligence satellites Titans launched changed the face of modern warfare. They improved communications, ship tracking and weather forecasting for U.S. troops and boosted the nation's ability to keep an eye on adversaries around the world.
Beginning with the 1990 Gulf War, the military's reliance on space skyrocketed. Titan-boosted satellites gave the U.S. the ability to launch quick precise strikes in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan while risking few casualties in comparison to past conflicts.
"The Titans have been very versatile and reliable vehicles for national defense and space exploration," Guillemette said. "They were just a little cranky. The Titan 4, on the other hand, requires a staff of personal trainers and therapists to coax it off the launch pad."
Cranky and costly
The Air Force and Lockheed got the Titan 4 from the drawing board in 1985 to space in 1989, a remarkably short schedule since similar programs often need a decade or so to develop.
The Air Force believed Titans would launch monthly, for about $100 million each. Instead, demand for more military satellites plummeted. The Soviet Union fell apart. And the satellites already in orbit started living longer.
"When the Cold War ended, the flight rate went south," said John Pike, an independent analyst with a Washington-based think tank that follows space and military policy worldwide.
An army of workers is needed to build and ready the rockets no matter how often they fly. Making matters worse, most Titans had to be custom-matched to unique, secret spy satellites.
"There is no such thing as a production line for the Titan 4," Guillemette said. "Every vehicle is custom built and custom-tweaked. Usually you build a satellite to go on the rocket. They're building a rocket to go under the satellite."
The program has cost at least $30 billion, or well over a half-billion dollars for each rocket launched. That's close to what NASA says shuttle flights cost.
"It made all the sense in the world when they thought they were going to fly it once a month," Pike said. "When it turned out they were only flying it twice a year, you just had this enormous infrastructure, this enormous number of people, all of whom were essential to flying the thing."
Titan 4s were finicky too.
One sat on its pad for more than 1,000 days. A frustrated Air Force commander threatened to mount a plaque at the pad touting the $3.5 million-per-day bill to taxpayers for the idle rocket. Adding to the problem were a string of launch failures in the 1990s.
Three late-90s failures cost taxpayers about $3 billion and Congress grew irritated. Criticism became so frequent that one general compared bad-mouthing the Titan to beating a "tethered goat."
In the end, costs and technology led the Air Force to look for replacements. The military also wanted to stop using toxic propellant that posed a danger to workers and nearby residents.
In a written response to questions, the Air Force said, "The Titan program has been one of the Air Force's most successful."
A Titan legacy
Titan 4 is leaving a legacy.
Its design, looking like three rockets strapped side-by-side, is mocked in the larger models of Boeing's new Delta 4 and Lockheed's Atlas 5. Titan lessons inspired faster, cheaper ways to ready the new rockets for flight.
"These new birds that are going to have this heavy lift capability, they look a lot like the Titan," Dusenberry said. "There are a lot of improvements they've come up with and some very creative processing systems in terms of how to get the vehicles out to the pad, and that cut costs."
One problem that plagued Titan is repeating itself. Guesses about the cost of the new rockets were based on optimistic assumptions about how much business they might generate.
An expected boom in commercial satellites did not materialize. The per-launch price the military pays for rides on the Delta and Atlas is going up. That's a problem that plagues many long-term military and space projects.
"The big management challenge is how do you adjust gracefully to inevitable program turbulence," Pike said. "All of these programs have the same problems. They last so long that unavoidably, the world will change."
Published under license from FLORIDA TODAY. Copyright © 2004 FLORIDA TODAY. No portion of this material may be reproduced in any way without the written consent of FLORIDA TODAY.
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