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"Well, NASA now use the Atlas-Centaur. The question is whether or not after you do the integration work between the Titan IIID core vehicle and the Centaur, would this take you a long way along the road to the integration of the IIIB-Centaur so that in future years, say the late 1970's, NASA could be using the Titan IIIB-Centaur instead of the Atlas ? From a technical standpoint is the nature of the Titan IIID core vehicle such that it would be possible to use the benefit of the Titan IIID-Centaur integration in a Titan IIIB Centaur configuration ? What am I asking is whether or not, technically, the Titan IIIB is significantly different from the Titan IIID core ?"

(excerpt from: NASA authorization for fiscal year 1970, hearings)



"The TITAN IIIB/CENTAUR is the same basic vehicle as the TITAN IIID/CENTAUR without the two 5-segment, 120-inch solid propellant motors . In addition, dropping the solid propellant motors may necessitate minor changes in the guidance package. However, the important point to note here is that if the TITAN IIID/CENTAUR is developed then one can assume that the TITAN IIIB/CENTAUR will be developed."

(excerpt from: Analysis of selected deep-space missions, 1972)



***



"An unconvenient truth was that the Titan III just made more sense economically than any shuttle concept." Adelbert Tischler told aviation week recently

In Tischler opinion the technological readiness levels did not allowed for an efficient space shuttle, not in the 70's.

"Heiss and Morgenstern failed to understand that, not because they were dishonest, rather because they were economists above all." By contrast rocket scientists like Del Tischler James Preston Layton and Jerry Grey had good reasons for skepticism.

In the end all these arguments were made moot by the OMB unilateral killing of the shuttle a cold day of October 1971. NASA had to accept the Titan III as its next manned launch vehicle, and that created a host of new problems.

Marshall, which hated large solids for good reasons, found no role in the new program, pushed hard for a revival of the Saturn, then failed at its diversification atempt in the field of astronomy, before being closed.

The Air Force happily dropped out of a shuttle program it had largely killed through its severe requirements of large payload bay and big crossrange. The military welcomed the return of the Titan III to the fore front, only to find they had now to share their launch infrastructure - launch complexes 40 and 41 - with the civilian space agency.

The above fact was, by itself, outrageous.

How could the military force NASA accepting their requirements for the shuttle (big payload bay and high crossrange were part of the deal negociated by George Mueller in 1969), then never support that program in Congress ? It should be reminded that the military had a lot of support in Congress, something NASA cruelly lacked.

In order to understand Air force feelings toward the shuttle manned spaceflight has to be distinguished from space plane. Dyna Soar certainly was a manned space plane, but the MOL was a manned ship without any wings.

From the two aforementioned examples it can be deducted that Air Force limited support to the shuttle was probably more concerned with manned space flight than with the acquisition of a new launch vehicle.
In simple english, the Air Force had some interest for man-in-space, but not for a new launch vehicle, since the Delta, Atlas and Titan were doing a good job and didn't needed to be replaced.

Unfortunately for the Air Force, military man-in-space hardly justified itself alone (as an example, in June 1969 the MOL had been canned in favor of unmanned KH-8s, KH-9s and KH-11s).

So it is the satellite launch vehicle aspect of the shuttle that had to be used as a justifcation - either by NASA negociating with the Air Force, or Air Force negociating with Congress. That argument, however, was weakened by the fact that Delta, Atlas and Titan unmanned expendable were doing a fine job. As for the shuttle cost arguments, unlike NASA the military had a budget huge enough never to worry about that kind of detail. Similarly, the Air Force had not enough satellites to justify very high flight rates, and little interest in fixing things in orbit.

The Air Force had ample opportunity to emphasize its desire for crossrange by working within the Joint Study Group that Paine and Seamans had set up to seek a mutually-acceptable shuttle design. There were informal discussions as well. George Mueller, who continued to head NASA's OMSF through the whole of 1969, met repeatedly with Air Force representatives at his home in Georgetown, close to downtown Washington.
One of his guests was Michael Yarymovych, an Air Force deputy assistant secretary. Another guest, Grant Hansen, was assistant secretary for research and development. He and Mueller also were co-chairmen of the joint study.

These Air Force leaders knew that they held the upper hand. They were well aware that NASA needed a shuttle program and therefore needed both the Air Force's payloads and its political support. The payloads represented a tempting prize, for that service was launching over two hundred reconnaissance missions between 1959 and 1970. In addition to this, Air Force support for a shuttle could insulate NASA quite effectively from a charge that the Shuttle was merely a step toward sending astronauts to Mars.

Yet while NASA needed the Air Force, the Air Force did not need NASA. That service was quite content with existing boosters such as the Titan III. "Sure, NASA needs the shuttle for the space station," Hansen said in the spring of 1970. "But for the next 10 years, expendables can handle the Air Force job. We don't consider the Shuttle important enough to set money aside for it."

Yarymovych has a similar recollection:

"NASA needed Air Force support, both for payloads and in Congress. I told Mueller we'd support the Shuttle, but only if he gave us the big payload bay and the crossrange capability, so we could return to Vandenberg after a single orbit. Mueller knew that would mean changing Max Faget's beloved straight-wing design into a delta wing, but he had no choice. He agreed."

It was not that simple, of course; no impromptu discussion in Mueller's home would settle such an issue. Rather, it was a matter for the formal protocols of Air Force-NASA cooperation.

In the end NASA never really liked the Titan. It was a beast to launch and fly; and above all it was rather expensive. In 1974 veteran NASA manager Adelbert Tischler suggested administrator Beggs that in order to a) cut unit cost and b) compete with the coming Ariane then a commercial Titan might be interesting.

Beggs, however, told him that launching commercial satellites was not the agency job. And when Tischler mentionned the Shuttle economic studies, Beggs answered that was an accident in history.

Adelbert "Del" Tischler

"I remember Beggs told me - Of course NASA, while operating within the limits of its governmental character, could try marketing launch services to most of the same potential customers being courted by Arianespace. But I will remind you it is rather highly unusual for a Federal agency to undertake such a marketing effort." Tischler says.
"Beggs added that NASA had briefly got interested in the satellite launch business only because the shuttle had no other role after the space station was postponed by a decade, in 1970. Beggs concluded saying that the new shuttle, if ever build, would be first and above all a crew and cargo ferry to the space stations. I think he was spot on in his observations.

Tischler then considered leaving the space agency and trying to create an independant company that would seek commercialization of the Titan against Ariane. But what Titan ? Martin Marietta workhorse boasted a large numbers of variants.

Tischler imagined his Ariane-killer as based on the Titan IIIE of Viking and Voyager fame, a booster as a NASA official he evidently new rather well.

Also known as the Titan-Centaur, it was flanked by two large solids that made it too powerful and expensive for the commercial market. Tischler reasoned that if the two large solids were removed, and replaced by Delta nine small boosters, the resulting launcher would be a very good match for Ariane 1.

Technically that was a very sound project that could have seriously damaged the european launcher. Titan was a proven booster flying from twenty years where the Europeans started from scratch.

Politically, however, it was another matter. There the obstacles were formidable, big deadlockes that made Klaus Heiss nut.

Klaus Heiss ?

Through James Preston Layton Tischler had contacted that man, the coauthor of the shuttle economic study... that included the Titan.

Of course their opinions were irreparably different. Heiss still bitterly mourned the loss of the shuttle, mourning the loss of new space markets it would have created. To him NASA failure in getting the shuttle approved by the White House had made the space program stuck in a kind of prehistory made of expensive, throw-away boosters.
Heiss told Tischler of an intriguing idea of his: trying to apply the highly successful Comsat / Intelsat way-of-doing to launch vehicles.

Communication satellites were so far the sole money-making space business in existence. Their success resulted of an outstanding 1962 partnership between politics, NASA and private companies. Instead of bickering at each others as usual, they had forged a very efficient framework resulting in Comsat, later Intelsat.

Heiss touted this as a very successful model he really wanted to apply to future rocket companies. Tischler liked the idea: he had found his own Arianespace model.

Blunty, shortly before Ariane maiden flight the European Space Agency spun a commercial, private division to sell the launcher. That was called Arianespace, and was supposedly independant from either governments and the European Space Agency.

In America no such private consortium ever existed, because the background was extremely different.

In Europe the military satellite programs were unsignificant, if non-existing; in America they were huge. In Europe the aerospace companies were too small and fragmented to even try building and selling Ariane for their own profit. By contrast McDonnell Douglas (Delta) General Dynamics (Atlas) and Martin Marietta (Titan) were big enough to try and sell their rockets by themselves. It was just a matter of creating a new internal division within the company.

Ariane had to be build from scratch on the ruins of Europa, since Europe had no ballistic missiles powerful enough. By contrast, Delta, Atlas and Titan were all of military legacy.

As for the clients, at first glance NASA and the military had satellites to launch, plenty of them, forming a big captive market. Yet their procurement process were extremely cumbersome and driven by a host of political and industrial interests.

As a result, private companies that tried to create a niche beside the Scout, Delta, Atlas and Titan launchers ended squeezed between the governments and its contractors. Tischler spent the decade of the 80's battling with the government, the military, NASA and Martin Marietta, for meagre results.

The Europeans were creating Arianespace, a private, commercial entity totally independent from their ESA and CNES space agencies. The former would handle commercial satellites, the latter government missions. No such separation could exist yet in the USA: the idea of a private rocket company was not exactly popular at NASA, the military, or in Washington circles. Martin Marietta was not exactly enthusiast either: how could a commercial Titan escape them?

That did not prevented grandioses plans to be drafted. Adelbert Tischler was convinced that expendable lanchers could be cheap if build in numbers large enough. Having closely followed the shuttle debacle, he liked to remind that the breakeven point between throwaway and reusable boosters laid at forty flights a year or so. Above did the shuttle ruled; below, future belonged to Titan or Ariane expendables.

Tischler strategy was crystall clear: he wanted to launch loads of Titan rockets, in an attempt to drop their unit price through mass production.

At twenty or thirty launches a year then even the plain old Titan could earn money. The true question, Tischler added, boiled down to how many satellites were to be launched every year. The harsh truth was that the actual numbers favoured the expendables; bluntly, there were not enough payloads to justify the shuttle. Worse, he added, with electronics improving every year or even month thanks to the Moore law, better and longer lived satellites were build, meaning less and less payloads were available.

Tischler concluded that actual flight rates corresponded to a maximum of 25 flights a year, thus in the actual situation, the launch market belonged to expendables. As such, he strongly recommended to try and push Titan flight rates upwards to see if unit costs could be diminished by some orders of magnitude.

Building on Tischler vision, in 1978 Titan builder Martin Marietta, together with NASA, presented an extensive overhaul of Cape Canaveral and Merrit Island. Most of the space coast pads would be adapted to the Commercial Titan.

So far only the Air Force launch complex 40 and 41 were available. A third pad, numbered -42, had never been build. The plan imagined conversion of most of NASA Apollo gantries – 34, 37A, 37B, 39A and 39B which had been build for the Saturns. Eventually the railways ferrying the Titans would connect all the aforementionned launch complexes to the Vertical Integration Building were the Titan large solid rockets were stacked.

A bit farther down on the space coast were the old pads build at the dawn of the space age – LC-15, -16, -18, -19. They had launched prototype Titan II missiles, and later the dozen of manned Geminis.

Martin Marietta plan, although never implemented, presented an interesting atempt at rising the flight rates and standardizing the launchers. Ultimately the Delta and Atlas - launching from pads 17, 36A and 36B respectively - could be withdrawn and their gantries converted to Titan or its successor. As a conclusion, it is interesting to note that the Europeans dimensioned Ariane for a maximum of fourteen flights every year...

(...)

The path toward a privatization of the rocket fleet started in the late 70's. Unsurprisingly the push come from Intelsat. The American branch of that organization, Comsat, once enjoyed an ultra-dominant position within the organization Board of Governors. That domination gradually come to and end after 1971, with Europe gaining strength.

The reason was that whoever grabbed power within Intelsat could place its launch vehicle on the fledging market of communication satellites. In the day when Comsat dominated Intelsat, every satellite was boosted by Thor-Delta. When weight of the Intelsat IV satellites overwhelmed that rocket, the Atlas-Centaur took over. As soon as Comsat voting power was rolled back late 1976, Europe tried to pitch its Ariane launcher for launches of the incoming Intelsat V.

On 3 February 1977 the Ariane Programme was presented to the Intelsat Board of Governors, who were favourably impressed. A feasibility study was carried out by Comsat in consultation with an ESA/CNES team. It was concluded that Ariane could launch units six and seven if its performance was increased from 1670 kg to 1710 kg in transfer orbit, which was easily done. As for cost, ESA DG Gibson had proposed a tentative price of $25 million, which seemed to be roughly what Intelsat would have paid for an Atlas/Centaur launch. Indeed the only question mark over the use of Ariane was its reliability. "However", Comsat reported, "ESA has emphasised the low risk of the proposed approach and has undertaken to guarantee that customers will have full program visibility."

In December it was announced that the Intelsat Board of Governors had decided to launch an Intelsat V satellite with Ariane. It had been sold at $21.35 million, this being the marginal cost of fabrication of the launcher plus launch costs, and was scheduled for launch in 1981. Intelsat's choice was thanks both to the hard promotional work done by the ESA Executive and to the efforts of the European Governors in the Board who had used their new voting weight to impose the European option.

Yet, as Frederic D'Allest frankly recognizes "At the time Atlas Centaur was the reference launcher, proven, reliable. We had a very hard time selling Ariane against it, since we were unexperimented at the time. In fact we ultimately had to accelerate development of Ariane 2 and 3 to match it."

(...)

With or without the shuttle or the Agena or a universal launcher, in the end the Ariane threat by itself forced the American aerospace companies to react. They need a legal framework from the US governmenet, and in Carter time there was little interest in the subject. Things started to change with the election of Ronald Reagan. Late November 1980 the head of Reagan transition team on space, George Low, defined a major objective - the creation of one or multiple competitors to Ariane, via the privatization of Delta or Atlas or Titan IIIE. Another objective was the commercialization of space, through the space station and, most importantly, the Agena. Private companies urgently needed a legal framework to start their operations. Low noted that a lot of hurdles would have to be leveled - questions like the use of former missiles by private entities; their relation with NASA, their initial funding, customers, liability in the case of crashes, and many other issues.

(...)

The problem of transferring the U.S. civilian space transportation capability to the private sector is complex. We believe, however, that full commercialization of expendable launch vehicles (ELVs) is possible now, although the near-term prospects for commercializing U.S. space transportation are unclear, and the long-term prospects ride with an eventual reborn space shuttle or , more generally, a Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV).

There are few if any unknowns surrounding classic rockets operation. The market for launches is steadily growing: though it is not large enough to support all the lines (Titans, Atlas-Centaurs, Deltas, etc.), it could certainly support one of them. Because of various uncertainties, the aerospace companies have not shown much interest in dealing directly with any group backing private launch services.

In any case, today the single major impediment to commercialization of U.S. launch systems is the absence of a comprehensive Government policy that favors and encourages the participation of the private sector.

The Background

In the United States the Federal Government has heretofore provided launch vehicles and launch services for all users. While the Departement of Defence generally launches its own spacecraft, NASA has provided these services for its own missions and, on a reimbursable basis, for other U.S. Government users, foreign governments, and private entities.

Private industry has not generally marketed launch hardware or services directly to customers. Launch vehicles are sold to NASA, which then charges the customer; the agency has remained responsible for providing launch facilities and support services to all users.

(...)

In the early 1980s, small entrepreneurial companies made initial attempts to provide commercial launch services via low- cost rockets. Unfortunately for these first companies there was no single Government agency with the responsibility for regulating the private launch industry, and several Government agencies jumped in to fill the void in areas they perceived to be under their jurisdiction. As a result, prior to obtaining government clearance for launch operations. private launch companies had to wade through an immense bureaucratic licensing maze created by 18 different Government agencies !

In order to get a private rocket off the launch pad, the average firm has had to run a bureaucratic gauntlet of some 18 Federal agencies, overseeing 22 statutes or regulatory guidelines, none of them passed or promulgated with the express intent of overseeing commercial launch vehicles. Pre-launch approvals were required from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Department of State and the Departement of Defense, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Internal Revenue Service, the Material Transportation Board, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Department of Transportation, in addition to obtaining an export license and providing notification to the United States Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard !

A possibility here would be the mediation of a third-party broker; a further possibility might be the formation of a Government-chartered private corporation to provide launch services, leasing facilities at Kennedy Space Center. Rapid commercialization of U.S. expendable rockets would provide immediate advantages: competition for the Ariane.

(excerpt from: The rocket company, 2004)


***

"The addition of Delta small solids to the Titan core is rather straightforward yet it doubles the rocket performance to orbit. That launch vehicle is known as Titan IIIBS.

Originally sold with a Centaur as a civilian competitor to Ariane, a military variant of that vehicle recently appeared with an Agena upper stage.

A key aspect of the Titan IIIBS-Agena is that Lockheed space tug can reach orbit with its full load of propellant, all 7000 kg of it. As such the Agena can execute extremely large orbital maneuvers - for example a climb into geosynchronous orbit or turning large plane changes (28.5 to 51.6 degree, or 51.6 degree to polar orbit). Consideration was also given to electric propulsion; hydrazine arcjets could be fed from the chemical engine tanks, since the latter also burns hydrazine. An electric propulsion system would allow even larger plane changes at the expense of transit time."