Well! Good afternoon, everyone, it's that time once again. When we last left off, the Janus cargo lander had just touched down on the lunar surface, and our very own Nixonshead had won a very well-deserved Turtledove for the art he's brought to this thread. However, Janus will have to wait a bit longer for the arrival of Don Hunt and his Artemis 4 crew. This week, we're looking at NASA's other, other major program of the 90s, and checking in on the giant of the commercial launch industry: the Lockheed Titan.
Eyes Turned Skyward, Part III: Post #21
For all intents and purposes, Lockheed Astronautics had dominated the modern commercial launch market since that market had come into being. Indeed, along with early ESA attempts to commercialize Europa, Lockheed’s purchase of Martin’s Titan production lines and the subsequent retooling of the vehicle as a commercial launcher had created that market to begin with. Beginning with dual-launches of 2-ton satellites on the Titan IIIC, Lockheed’s other commercial space business, their satellite manufacturing division, had been integral to the development and popularization of the larger and more capable 4-ton bus, to the point where that size had become an industry standard, the so-called “full” bus, while the older 2-ton became the “half” bus. Not content to rest on their laurels, however, Lockheed had immediately jumped into promoting the even larger 6-ton “super” bus, which only the mighty Titan IIIE, with its Centaur upper stage, could lift to geosynchronous orbit. While competition like Europa 4 had then followed the trail Lockheed Astronautics had blazed, Lockheed’s constant innovation had ensured that its market share throughout the 80s never dropped below 50% of the global free launch market.
However, by the early 90s, the picture was getting worryingly less rosy for Lockheed. Simply put, the Titan program was showing its age. Potential competition like the Europa 5, the Russian Neva and Vulkan, and the rising Chinese program were coming which not only could match Titan’s payload capacities but actually exceed them, dual-launching payloads that even Titan III-E could barely lift. Worse, rising ecological concerns over Titan’s hypergolic propellants were causing Titan’s low operating costs--always the trump card in Lockheed’s competitive prices--to spike upwards, with no end in sight. This one-two punch, and resulting losses of several key contracts, was enough to make Lockheed begin pursuing a path forward for its Astronautics division before they lost any further ground. Early proposals were built around adapting Titan components to new uses, modifying the core to use kerosene and liquid oxygen as the Titan I had done in the early 1960s, or dispensing with the core altogether to use clusters of the big solid boosters practically synonymous with the Titan design. Ultimately, however, no mere tinkering to the venerable Titan formula could solve its problems; the solution would have to come from another source entirely.
Elsewhere in the aerospace business, McDonnell-Douglas was in the midst of a prolonged struggle for survival. The mid-80s launches of several strong competitors to its widebody DC-10 and narrowbody DC-9 aircraft had been devastating to the company’s bottom line, as it struggled to even hold onto third place in the world airliner market against Boeing, Airbus, and Lockheed. Attempts to drum up interest in new aircraft types had proved less than successful, while the engineering costs associated with these projects had come as even more of a shock to the company’s bottom line. Only a series of successful military contracts, beginning with the F-15 tactical fighter in the early 1970s, had enabled the company to keep afloat, so the company’s failure in the Advanced Tactical Fighter competition was a massive blow, raising the spectre of bankruptcy before the company’s investors. Thus, in the early 1990s, McDonnell’s board began to reluctantly pursue a partner for a merger or buyout. Lockheed, whose continued successes in the widebody and narrowbody fields had been the straw that broke the camel’s back, was one of the first companies to express interest in purchasing the firm. While counter-proposals from Boeing and Airbus were also heard, Lockheed’s counter-offer was felt by McDonnell management to be the strongest, as well as the most likely to pass regulatory muster.
In addition to an attractive package offer, Lockheed also offered a chance to position the resulting merged company well in a range of fields. Lockheed’s Tristar and Bistars combined with the DC-10 were already strong players in the widebody field, while the company would also be well-positioned in the growing regional jet market, and in the perfect place to begin the lead-in to the Joint Strike Fighter competition, potentially the largest government contract in history, with an eventual value measured in the trillions of dollars. As with commercial and military aviation, Lockheed Astronautics would synergize well with McDonnell’s launch business. The improved Delta 5000 was, in Lockheed’s eyes, an attractive entrant at the small end of commercial launches, and with streamlining of production and logistics to cut costs could easily gain a significant market share in launch of proposed constellations of small LEO communications satellites, riding cultural similarity and time-to-market to defeat its competitors, both traditional and new. With a 4-ton capacity to GTO, it could also retain a toehold in Lockheed’s traditional geosynchronous business while Delta experience with cryogenic launch vehicles was being brought to bear in replacing Titan. Talks persisted throughout 1994, and In April 1995, Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas announced their plans to merge into a single corporation under the name Lockheed-McDonnell. Nevertheless, Lockheed’s management was too canny to bet the future of the company, or even a significant division of it, on a single deal, and was already pursuing an alternative path forwards, one riskier but, potentially, more rewarding than any refinement of Titan or Delta.
From the start, Al Gore’s presidency had been characterized by his enthusiastic backing of new, more advanced technology as the solution to a wide range of policy problems. While the pursuit of alternative energy sources and the so-called “internet” boom were the manifestations most familiar (or infamous) in political circles, Gore’s overhaul of NASA after the Richards-Davis Report had also been infused with some of this characteristic technocratic spirit. In the same 1993 NASA appropriation bill which had cut the Ares program as an excess of expensive studies without immediate practical application, Gore had requested--and received--funding for NASA to begin a major effort to carry out basic research on a variety of new space technologies, with the centerpiece of a reusable launch vehicle demonstrator, intended to follow-on from work done in the last decade on the X-30 and X-40 programs, as well as the long-lost promise of the “Space Shuttle,” a dream which had never died in aerospace circles even as NASA had moved ahead with Apollo-serviced stations and now back on to the moon. If it succeeded in demonstrating key technologies, Gore hoped that this new program could develop technologies to make Earth orbit more accessible, and keep American launch companies dominant into a new age of space development. With Artemis proceeding relatively smoothly after Davis’ drastic interventions in the mode decision and contracting, it was this new program which was to prove the primary recipient of Davis’ scrutiny and an outlet for his legendary temper over the following years.
Lloyd Davis had never had much patience for programs that sprouted studies like weed and whose budgets grew like kudzu. In his mind, programs should be collected around a single overarching goal, and any new studies or spending should be driven primarily by that work necessary to make that central idea a success. This personal frustration was one reason why the Richards-Davis report had so heavily borne down on the Ares office and Artemis long-term base planning, which had struck Davis’ mind as bloated and ill-directed. However, with Gore’s technology development program, Davis found himself ensnared by his boss in a pet project which was almost exactly calculated to drive Davis up a wall, and to dispatch a flurry of his soon-to-be-famous flaming memoranda and electronic mail across Headquarters.
To begin with, instead of having a singular objective like “land on the moon” or “build a space station,” Gore’s program was actually divided into two, each with its own separate budget line, and each therefore separately subject to Congressional oversight. Of the two, the first and most straightforward was the Launcher Technology Development Office, a catch-all for studies and prototypes investigating technologies ranging from composite tanks and orbital satellite refueling to staged-combustion kerosene engines, hydrogen aerospikes, and peroxide/kerosene hypergolic engines to replace conventional selections for capsule, probe, and comsat maneuvering systems, all aimed at moving the current state-of-the-art incrementally. In theory, the government-supported technology development taking place at LTDO would serve as a proof-of-concept and incubator for commercial projects; if even a few of them succeeded, the cost of accessing space could fall dramatically, regardless of the success of the other part of the program.
That was nothing less than a reusable suborbital spacecraft capable of flight to near-orbit, a horizontal landing on a runway, followed by a rapid turnaround for further flights, intended both to provide a guaranteed user for the advanced technologies of LTDO and, hopefully, serve as a prototype for the long dreamt-of single-stage-to-orbit shuttle. If it worked--no small “if”--it would enable not just an incremental leap in American spaceflight, but a revolution in spaceflight--one which would assure US leadership in spaceflight for decades to come. While the program’s promise was clear enough to Davis, especially since he’d been intimately involved in fleshing out Gore’s idea from a mere notion into a real program, the real question in his mind was how to stop the two from driving him crazy in the meantime, particularly with the more pressing Artemis program consuming much of his attention. At least for the LTDO, the task was as “simple” as careful contract monitoring and progress reporting, something Davis had no small experience--and reputation--in doing. While his other duties prevented him from devoting very much time to that arm of the effort, he made sure to conduct random “spot-inspections” to keep contractors on their toes and prevent the worst sort of contractual excesses. The demonstrator, however, quickly developed into a problem all its own.
Bidding for the demonstrator contract had been intense. Among other fringe bidders, Lockheed, McDonnell, Rockwell, Boeing, and Northrop all tendered serious, well-funded proposals. Surprisingly, Boeing’s entry was eliminated early on, despite their absorption of Grumman, the manufacturers of Starcat, the only previous attempt at developing a reusable launch vehicle to have demonstrated any sort of real-world success. With NASA contract language specifying a lifting, horizontal landing profile instead of the vertical, rocket-braked Starcat design, in an effort to reduce risk, Boeing’s nominal experience advantage had vanished into thin air, forcing them to spend as much effort as anyone else developing their proposal from the ground up. Added to this factor, Boeing was suffering from the teething difficulties of a major merger and the strain of developing and building the Artemis lander, preventing them from putting their full effort towards the X-33 contract. However, while the X-40 experience of Boeing was ill-suited to the task at hand, Lockheed had been lead contractor on the X-30 scramjet space-plane program, a much closer match to the desired profile than Grumman’s experience. In the process of preliminary design of an airframe for the never-built X-30 prototype, Lockheed engineers had worked extensively with modern composite materials and challenged the problem of reusable thermal protection systems head-on, examining the potential of replaceable ablatives, ceramic tiles, and metallic systems. Moreover, the combination of Lockheed’s strength in the commercial launch market and the increasing external pressure on their business had made them keenly interested in any new launcher proposals--and if those proposals were going to be as potentially revolutionary as X-33, and funded partially by NASA besides, then Lockheed wanted to make sure it was going to get in on the ground floor. Thus, Lockheed had made the X-33 a priority, pairing elements from the X-30 development with earlier proposals dating back to before even the Space Shuttle studies of the late 1960s in an exceptionally strong bid proposal.
In the end, the technical depth of Lockheed’s bid, along with their evident interest in commercializing the vehicle if successful and willingness to invest corporate funds above and beyond government money, won them the contract, which was assigned the designation X-33. There were three primary technologies which NASA wished to test with the X-33: advanced thermal protection systems, aerospike engines, and lightweight composite propellant tanks. For the thermal protection system, Lockheed proposed to use metallic structures developed originally for X-30--while able to sustain less peak heating than ablatives or ceramics, they had been found to be substantially more durable when Lockheed had tested them, and the low mass per area of the X-33 was planned to allow heating low enough that the more maintainable system could be used. For the engines, Rocketdyne was subcontracted to develop a linear-aerospike derivative of the venerable J-2, a pair of which would provide propulsion for the X-33. A dilemma emerged, though, with the tanks which would consume much of the volume of the rounded wedge fuselage. In order to make SSTO possible, significant weight advancements over conventional metal tanks would be required. Composite materials had evolved immensely in the past decade, and seemed to hold promise of such weight reductions. However, no structures as complex as the proposed X-33 tanks had ever been constructed, nor had the composite honeycombs Lockheed proposed using been tested with cryogenic fluids. The Lockheed proposal readily admitted that these were the weak spots of the design, and the risk piqued Davis’ concerns. After all, while the vehicle was designed to test all three, if the propellant tanks could not be made to work, the entire vehicle would be grounded, preventing any tests of the engine or thermal protection scheme. Therefore, Davis demanded that the reference design would include composite tanks only for the liquid hydrogen tanks, and that an alternate design for more conventional aluminum-lithium alloy versions of the tank would be developed to production-ready state as a backup design for early flights if needed. This raised the cost of the program, but given the President’s strong support of the program Davis was able to “rob Peter to pay Paul” and divert funds from the technology development line to the X-33 budget to cover the extra expense.
As work proceeded through the early 1990s, the vehicle became known internally as the StarClipper, though technically the name referred to the planned future derivatives which would carry cargo all the way to orbit. However, and true to Davis’ worst nightmares, the program provided no end of headaches even reaching demonstration flights. The aerospike engines functioned well, though they had to revert to the gas-generator cycle of the original J-2 as opposed to the combustion tap-off cycle of the simplified modern J-2S. More worryingly, the engine had also grown heavier during design and testing in the mid-90s, as additional coatings had to be added to the centerbody to enable it withstand the heat. This added weight had to be compensated for by carefully re-designing the rest of the vehicle’s systems, but there were limits to how much it could be trimmed given the lifting body shape, as the center of mass could only be moved so far before the vehicle would become unflyable. However, the largest problem was with the composite tanks. In spite of Lockheed’s experience, the honeycomb tank walls intended for strength, lightness, and insulation had proved a critical design weakness. In testing in 1996 and 1997, the tank’s fabrication process continued to run into problems, and it appeared that the vehicle might not be capable of meeting the planned test schedule. The design of the alternative aluminum tanks had already been completed, and Davis managed to secure additional funding to begin production of these conventional tanks in parallel, along with a promise from Lockheed to match the added cost.
1998 saw airframe integration commencing while two different sets of hydrogen tanks were in the process of testing. While the aluminum alloy tank was able to pass its early testing with flying colors, the issues which had plagued the composite tank throughout design and manufacture followed it to the test stand. In November, the composite tank began critical, as tests showed an alarming tendency to delaminate, allowing cryogenic hydrogen to begin to leak into and fill the honeycomb spacer layer between the layers of the tank walls. While a solution, involving filling this gap with a closed-cell foam, was considered, it would add another half-ton to the tank mass. Given the center-of-mass issues already being caused by the engine’s growth, this would push it dangerously close to design limits. Worse, thanks to the complex composite joints at the intersections of the tank’s multiple lobes, the composite tanks were already roughly the same weight as their conventional equivalents. Davis and Lockheed came to a decision: the composite tanks were put on hold while a full review of the design was carried out, examining alternatives. In the meantime, the aluminum tanks would be integrated with the airframe to allow the X-33 to make its first flights in 2000.
The new millenium saw the StarClipper undergoing final preparations for testing to Edwards Air Force Base in California, where a launch site had already been prepared for it. Like the Starcat launch site at White Sands, the X-33 facility was minimal--a horizontal integration hangar, a combination erector/launch tower, assorted cryogenic storage tanks, and a long runway. This was required for the Lockheed-provided Bistar freighter which the company had converted (at its own expense) into a ferry aircraft to retrieve the X-33 from the landing sites hundreds of miles away where it would land on longer flights. It was on the back of this Bistar Ferry that the X-33 made its first flights, starting with captive carry tests to verify ferry configuration, then moving to approach and landing tests, in which the demonstrator was released from the back of the Bistar and guided itself to a gliding landing on the runway. These initial series of tests consumed much of spring and early summer, but by July, the X-33 was ready for its first powered flight. The vehicle made some belated fireworks on July 7th, lifting off for the first time on a nearly-invisible tower of hydrolox exhaust. On its maiden solo flight, the X-33 reached an apogee of just a few miles and travelled only 50 miles downrange. After apogee, the StarClipper’s onboard computers turned the vehicle, and used its aerodynamics and speed to bring it bring it back to the runways at Edwards. The vehicle performed nominally, touching down almost exactly on the runway centerline before rolling to a halt. Several flights would follow on this profile, which allowed the vehicle to be quickly turned around for another flight. Two pairs of flights were made in August to twice demonstrate a 3-day turnaround, and in September another pair showed off a launch-to-launch turnaround of just over 24 hours--Lockheed had belatedly matched the achievements of the Starcat.
However, matching Starcat’s flight records wasn’t the X-33’s goal; demonstrating high-altitude horizontal flight was. In order to carry the vehicle to the edges of its performance envelope, it would have to fly higher, faster, and further afield. In October, the X-33 concluded its first year of flight testing with its 9th flight, in which it reached a speed of Mach 4 and an apogee of just under 30 miles before landing 180 miles downrange at Nellis Air Force Base. Over the winter, the vehicle was to be extensively torn down and examined for the effects of the flights to date. In the spring, flight testing would resume with a series of longer, fast, higher flights which would push the StarClipper demonstrator to the very edges of its performance envelope. However, as this was being planned, the program’s future was up in the air. Continuing work on the composite tanks and improvements to the aerospike engine had been able to come closer to the originally promised performance goals, but were still unable to reach the level necessary for the follow-up orbital SSTO, with margins being simply too tight to allow a go-ahead. Like the Starcat before it, the main effect of the X-33 had been to invalidate another approach to SSTO in the aerospace community. While Lockheed wrestled with the implications of this and its own long road to replace Titan, however, another firm was going all-in on reusable spaceflight in a big way--and with the direct intent of overthrowing Lockheed’s commercial dominance once and for all.
