In better times, Martin Marietta Titan 340 Ex- pendable Launch Vehi- cle (ELV) lifts off with spacebound military payload. Successive Titan 340 failures bracketed the destruc- tion of Space Shuttle Challenger. putting USAF's space-launch program on hold last year. Things are looking up, now that Air Force Systems Command's Space Division has con- ducted its Titan 340 in- spection and recovery program and has put into effect its compre- hensive space-launch recovery plan. leading to a better mix of booster rockets to augment the Shuttles in assuring fu- ture US access to space. Mr HE US space program is begin- Vital military pay- ning to lose the snakebitten look loads are still on the it took on last year amid a shocking succession of accidents befalling ground, but USAF is Space Shuttle Challenger and three unmanned launch vehicles. rebuilding its launch The program still has a long, long capability to be way to go in fully recovering from the impact of those accidents. They stronger and more left the Air Force incapable of versatile than that of launching growing numbers of satel- lites vital to national security. the pre-Challenger This sobering—even scary— state of affairs will persist into next era. year and will not be much alleviated for another year or so after that. Shuttle Orbiters will not fly again until February 1988, at the earliest. The first of the big Titan IV Comple- mentary Expendable Launch Vehi- cles (CELVs) now being developed to carry outsized payloads high into Coming space will not be ready for launch until early 1989. Less powerful boosters are avail- able, but they are relatively few in number and cannot take most high- priority military payloads to where Back they need to go in space. Even so, Air Force space officials are feeling a bit better about the space program's prognosis these days. They believe that the space- In launch recovery plan now in place to correct launch-system weak- nesses glaringly exposed by the Challenger accident in particular will result in launch capabilities far Space better—more vigorous, more ver- satile, and less vulnerable—than those of the pre-Challenger era. Such robust, resilient launch ca- pabilities are sorely needed. National security has become heavily dependent on the increas- ingly sophisticated satellites that provide communications, weather information, surveillance, early warning of attack, and navigational support to US strategic and conven- tional forces. Better satellites of all BY JAMES W. CANAN such varieties are in hand or in the SENIOR EDITOR making. They are worth nothing, however, while on the ground. Blueprint for Launch The space-launch recovery pro- gram devised by Air Force Systems Command's Space Division in Los Angeles, Calif., is a blueprint for getting those satellites launched as efficiently and as expeditiously as possible well into the 1990s. Col. Donald C. DePree, SD's AIR FORCE Magazine / February 1987 45 Deputy for Space Transportation The Air Force intends to launch For instance, this month was to Systems, characterizes that pro- military payloads on the Shuttles have marked the start of something gram as "step one" in the space pro- only when this is imperative or most big for the US armed forces. The gram's comeback and as "doable on convenient. In all other instances, it first Navstar satellite of an eighteen- the national level." will launch such payloads on ex- satellite GPS operational constella- "Technical problems are the rela- pendable boosters. tion was scheduled to be launched tively easy ones," Colonel DePree In keeping with this, USAF plans aboard a Shuttle Orbiter. declares. "They can always be to design or to redesign several US forces, spread thinly in the fixed. The problems of decisions, types of satellites to be capable of execution of their global responsi- strategies, and plans are the tough going either way. Among them are bilities, are counting on that ones. In past months, those kinds of the Milstar Extremely High Fre- Navstar constellation to give air, things have been thrashed out, and quency (EHF), tough-to-jam satel- sea, and land units ultraprecise now it's over to us in the field to do lites that are expected to be the position-fixing data, thus enabling the implementing." crowning glories of defense commu- them to make the most of their mo- The Challenger accident "made nications in the 1990s and beyond, bility and firepower. us come to grips with the need for a the Defense Satellite Communica- They will have to wait a long time national-level strategy for space and tions System (DSCS III) satellites, for it to happen. Given the launch made the nation realize that we do the Defense Support Program situation, the Air Force will be need assured access to space," (DSP) early warning satellites, and lucky to get the first Navstar opera- Colonel DePree asserts. the Navstar navigation satellites. tional satellite into orbit by early Air Force officials take satisfac- Prior to Challenger, the Defense 1989. tion in the American public's post- Department's Strategic Defense Ini- By now, too, the new-generation Challenger awareness of some tiative Organization (SDIO) antici- DSCS III communications satellites other verities that USAF had al- pated using the Shuttles for a great should have been proliferating in ways honored but was often many tryouts of SDI technologies space as scheduled. Only two are in stymied in getting across. These are for space-oriented defense against orbit. The Air Force is taking deliv- that the US must: ballistic missiles. eries on some of the twelve addi- • Exploit space for all it is worth Now SDIO is considering moving tional DSCS III satellites that it will as a military arena, which is plenty. a substantial number of such pay- need to position in space as an op- • Never get into the perilous loads off the Shuttles and onto un- erational constellation and as position of depending too much on manned launchers. spares, but it must store them be- only one launch system, as it did cause it has no way of launching with NASA's Shuttle-centered Comeback Momentum them. Space Transportation System A few months ago, Vice Chair- Those satellites are virtually in- (STS). man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. dispensable. In relaying the critical • Use man more judiciously in Robert T. Herres, then Commander military messages that make it pos- space and leave it to unmanned, ex- in Chief of US Space Command and sible for the US to deter war and to pendable launch vehicles to truck of North American Aerospace De- wage it, they will be much more ca- satellites into orbit on all occasions fense Command, reflected on the pable and survivable than the older not requiring human interaction post-Challenger comeback now satellites of the DSCS II constella- with the hardware. gathering momentum. tion now doing that job in space. • Bear down in developing such General Herres said that a crucial Across the spectrum, satellites spacecraft as modular unmanned element in that comeback will need needed by the armed forces for a launchers and manned aerospace to be better teamwork among mili- variety of force-enhancing purposes planes. tary and civilian space officials in are languishing in storage. The Air • Acknowledge once and for all cutting the soaring costs of doing Force must pay extra to store them that space missions are inherently business in space. or to put off their production in risky and should be populated, "Despite the discouraging set- order to avoid having to store them. when necessary, by professional backs of past months, I am more Either way, space program costs go crews—period. convinced than ever that our goals, up. Space Division's space-launch re- objectives, and ambitions are on USAF's Space Launch Complex covery program addresses all this. track," the General said. "We have Six (SLC-6) at Vandenberg AFB has It emphasizes USAF's future ac- become dependent on space, and also been idled. The first Shuttle quisition of Titan IVs to share this means that what we seek to do launch from SLC-6 was to have heavy-lift duties with the Shuttles, there must be undertaken out of ab- taken place last July. It will not take of Medium Launch Vehicles solute necessity—and what must be place until 1992, and SLC-6 will re- (MLVs) to launch Navstar Global done out of necessity must be done main on "operational caretaker sta- Positioning System (GPS) satellites, right. tus" until then. and of Space Launch Vehicles "We can't expect our forces to Meanwhile, a launchpad at Van- (SLVs)—modifications of Titan us prevail in war without space sys- denberg is being modified for that were deactivated as ICBM tems." launching the Titan IVs that USAF launchers—to boost medium-size The latest and best of satellites for had the foresight to begin develop- military payloads into polar orbit such systems are going nowhere for ing prior to the Challenger disaster from Vandenberg AFB, Calif. lack of launchers. to shoulder Shuttle-sized payloads. 46 AIR FORCE Magazine / February 1987 The Air Force will buy twenty-three cated than it had seemed at first, for could turn out to be "extremely Titan IVs instead of the ten original- the space-launch situation soon be- tight." ly planned. came even worse. Less than three months after Congress Responds Assessing the Setback Challenger, an Air Force Titan 34D Working through the plight of the The only officials who know how ELV with a classified military pay- Titan 34D and the change in the badly the launching limbo affects load exploded nine seconds after Shuttle schedule, Space Division classified satellites are those with liftoff at Vandenberg AFB, Calif.