Well! It's that time once again, and in this weekend of anticipation for the maiden launches of several important OTL commercial vehicles (Falcon 9 v1.1 and Cygnus are both headed to the pad within the week!), how about we check in on one of TTL's commercial success stories, American Launch Services, Inc? This post was a lot of fun to work up, and I hope everyone enjoys it as much as I enjoyed writing it. (Fun fact: due to the timing of writing, this is IIRC the first post of Eyes Part III which was completed, though one other was started before it.) 1943 replies, 249229 views.
Eyes Turned Skyward, Part III: Post #3
During the 1980s, two major commercial launch providers had emerged in the United States from the scrum of companies that had attempted to make a business of it. Lockheed, with their purchase of the Titan series, was by far the larger, but the other, American Launch Services, was perhaps more interesting for being one of the first aerospace firms specifically founded as a spaceflight company to succeed and grow. With their Caravel launcher, based on surplus Minuteman I missile bodies, ALS by 1988 was consistently launching 6 or more payloads per year from their Matagorda, TX launch site on lofted suborbital paths over the Gulf of Mexico and on orbital tracks aimed through the gap between Florida and Cuba. However, even as their launch rate increased, their launch manifest grew faster. Less than two hours from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, the ALS Matagorda Launch Site became a minor attraction for JSC personnel, giving ALS some valuable back channel connections to NASA. Through these back channels, they became aware of a desire on the part of NASA and the DoD for Explorer-class orbital payloads larger than the 3 ton max of the Caravel family. Caravel had been conceived mostly to serve the sub-orbital sounding rocket role--the market developing for relatively small orbital payloads had been unanticipated, and required more of the larger Caravel variants than ALS’s market projections had estimated. At the same time, NASA was not just looking to make more use of the sub-3-ton class that Caravel already served, but to expand into payloads between the current Caravel range and the lower range of the Delta 4000, cheaper payloads which perhaps couldn’t justify the cost of a full Delta 4000, but needed more than Caravel could currently provide. When combined with the stable cashflow that the success of Caravel offered, such speculations bounced between NASA engineers and ALS’ team during weekend trips to watch launches at Matagorda, leading ALS to believe that there was an unfilled niche in the launch market where they had a chance to do more than just survive, but to evolve and grow into the 90s. Thus, in 1987, ALS moved forward on a new development program aimed to meet this need. As the Caravel had been named for the small Portuguese ships commonly used for exploration, the new booster would be named for the larger ships developed to follow them for trans-Atlantic trade and development: Carrack.
However, ALS was faced with a dilemma - their successes to date had largely been built around integrating existing designs, not development of new launch vehicles from the ground up. In fact, it was this ability to develop its vehicle more cheaply via integration expertise rather than trying to develop new hardware that had been key to ALS succeeding where others in the late-70s space boom had instead gone bust. Caravel had been built around clustered Minuteman stages, with one set igniting on the ground and lofting the remaining stack to altitude before a second set would fire and lift the vehicle most of the way into orbit. A third stage, such as a Star 48, could be employed on orbital mission for final orbit circularization. None of these stages were ALS products, instead, ALS’ expertise was in integration mechanisms: interfaces, fairings, and systems engineering, not engines and tanks. ALS had learned a lot from Caravel development and operations--first, by employing a single type of booster for the first and second stages (enabled by use of a high-thrust basic core) they could minimize costs. Additionally, the nearly all-solid design resulted in minimal pad infrastructure requirements, as opposed to the traditional fuel bunkers and cryogenic tanks required for other launchers. The all-solid design was not, however, a panacea superior in every respect to more conventional boosters. In order to hit a given apogee target or orbital position with a launcher, precision had to be achieved in stage performance, with the upper stages adjusting to fly the vehicle as close as possible to the destination despite lower-stage aerodynamic buffeting, underperformance, or other variation. This required a coast phase to be built in between the first and second stage ignitions to build in margin. By fine-tuning the coast time and new orientation after coast, the onboard guidance could carefully spend margin to make up for underperforming lower stages. However, this in turn meant that if the mission went nominally, this margin was wasted. This drove ALS to look for a liquid option for their new booster’s final stage, which would be able to make up for any underperformance by dynamic adjustment of throttle as opposed to requiring a longer coast phase. This would by itself result in measurable increases in achievable performance. This experience with Caravel informed ALS as they began to develop its larger cousin.
Given their success with the clustered-solid Caravel, ALS engineers quickly converged on a similar design for Carrack. However, the Minuteman stage they were using was already one of the largest monolithic solid stages in common use. The Castor 4 in use on Delta 4000 was roughly the same mass, and though even larger composite-wound motors were in development to replace the Castors, the wait would be several years and ALS was unwilling to risk their new launcher on the uncertain position of being a second buyer on a much larger government contract. The larger multi-segment solids used on Titan and Multibody were far too large, and the complexity of multiple segments was undesirable. ALS thus began to consider solids never before used as launch vehicle components. The MX missile, the successor to the Minuteman II and III still in service, had by the 1980s finally evolved from a technology development program to an active program, with the final result, the Peacekeeper missile, beginning to be deployed in 1986. However, even as they were being introduced, the missile’s fate had been sealed: in 1985, when asked to approve the full 100-missile purchase, Congress had instead favored the sub-launched Trident II, which by this time had achieved similar payloads and had none of the worries about counter-force Soviet targeting which had initially inspired the MX program--and which had been brought back as a cause against it when various mobile basing systems had been discarded for cost reasons. Thus, by 1987, the Peacekeeper missile production lines were in full swing, with development and testing complete, but with no future once the first round of missiles were complete. In this situation, ALS saw the solution to its problems. At 53 tons fueled, the SR-118 first stage of the Peacekeeper was almost double the size of the Minuteman stages ALS was already using--perfect as a base for the new Carrack launch system. Sounding out the Department of Defense on the question of availability received an enthusiastic response--if Carrack could directly support Peacekeeper production capability, the Air Force hoped it might in the future be able to eventually convince Congress to resume Peacekeeper production.
Based on the initial leads with the DoD, ALS reached out to Thiokol, the manufacturers of the Peacekeeper first stages about production of a slightly modified civilian variant. ALS wanted two subvariants--one fitted with a vacuum optimized nozzle and a regressive-burning grain for the second stage, and the other for the first stage designed with variable number of booster attach points. ALS envisioned stacking one of the altitude-compensated civilian SR-118 stages (which received the designation “Castor 120” in civilian use for their loaded weight in thousands of pounds) on top of another Castor 120, this one optimized for sea level and fitted with attach points for up to 4 additional Castor 120 boosters. With a suitable liquid stage, ALS calculated that such a Carrack would be more than capable of replacing the Caravel for the 1 ton and greater range their customers were requesting, and equally capable of expanding their maximum payload from 3 tons to almost 6.
This left the question of what would make a “suitable liquid stage.” Ideally, ALS hoped to serve payloads headed not just to LEO, but also to GTO and beyond with Carrack, as the 6 tons LEO payload could allow them to single-launch payloads that otherwise would have to fly as secondaries on Delta 4000, Titan, or Europa launches. If their prices could compete, this new market would enable ALS to further expand, perhaps opening a polar-dedicated launch site. Thus, the ALS engineers favored a hypergolic third stage for the Carrack family. In order to ensure suitable T/W off the pad in the single-Castor smallest form, the stage could mass no more than roughly 7.5 tons. Additionally, ALS hoped to once again minimize development. They found the answer to these requirements by once again shopping out of another company’s catalogue of dying programs. The Agena stage, with a history of hundreds of launches stretching back to the dawn of the space program, was still in production by Lockheed Astronautics for their Titans. However, as more of their launches switched to the larger, higher-energy Centaur-D, Agena was slowly fading away. In every respect, it met ALS’s requirements--at 6.8 tons fueled, it met the mass restrictions, it could start many times in orbit for potential GTO or BEO applications, and the 30-year history meant that ALS could be confident in what they were getting. In order to minimize modifications, the Agena would need to be encapsulated within the payload fairing along with the payload, but this was considered a minor tradeoff. With their components selected, ALS’s skilled integration specialists went to work, and Carrack began to be available for reservations in 1989 for 1992 introductory launches. Alongside several commercial firms, the Department of Defense and NASA were eager early customers, as the price [1] was slightly lower than the smaller Delta 4000 vehicles which the Carrack’s maximum range could nearly match. The DoD additionally was pleased at finding a way to discreetly support their missile infrastructure through a commercial civilian firm, and viewed money spend on Carrack payloads something of an indirect subsidy to maintaining Peacekeeper production capabilities for the future.
Back at ALS, the Carrack program resulted a major change for their corporate structure. An entire new pad had to be built and staffed at Matagorda, with new handling infrastructure for the larger Castor 120 stages, and new storage tanks and plumbing for the hypergolic fuels required for Agena. New staff was hired, drawing in part on ex-Martin Titan engineers and technicians laid off by Lockheed Astronautics as part of the “rightsizing” done to make Titan competitive in the global marketplace. These new employees brought with them a wealth of experience in hypergolics handling that ALS was desperate to learn, as well as with the Agena stage. However, ALS’ core competency still lay in integration, and their major growth also occurred in that field. A new set of facilities for processing payloads for flight was established at Matagorda, primarily to serve Carrack flights at Launch Complex 2, though Caravel flights from LC-1 were also to make use of it. This facility served as a proving ground for taking their experience in launch vehicle integration and applying it to preparing commercial payloads--a service ALS executives hoped to perhaps sell as a subcontract to companies like McDonnell and Lockheed in the future. Finally, in order to launch vehicles as large as Carrack with the regularity it needed to in order to turn regular profits, ALS had to deal with state and federal regulatory agencies. Environmental impacts of Matagorda had to be reconsidered and filed with the EPA, the FAA had to reconsider the effects of Matagorda’s keep-out zones on flights into Houston and other airports, state and local noise regulations had to be considered and addressed. Reports even had to be filed with the county engineer concerning the effects on traffic patterns from the road closings necessary to secure the launch zone and the losses in tourism that might be caused by the closings of beaches and recreational boating areas under the vehicle flight paths. As part of an initiative to grow Texas as a center for high-tech fields, ALS received aid from Governor Ann Richards, who put some weight behind clearing a path (at least at the state level) for speeding Matagorda’s enhanced status as a world-class spaceport.
Finally, the necessary forms were all filed, and the spaceport was cleared for expanded operations. As the company grew into its new role with new talents, new facilities, and new permits, the first Carrak launch proceeded to the launch pad only slightly behind schedule in early 1993--an astounding achievement in aerospace, where a minor delay is rare, and an on-time introduction nearly impossible. However, the first launch of the vehicle, carrying a demonstration satellite assembled as project by students at the USAF Academy, was not entirely smooth, either literally or metaphorically. Unanticipated thrust oscillations during the second half of the second-stage Castor’s burn caused a minor structural failure in the vehicle’s second/third stage interstage, which had the challenging job of supporting the Agena and payload and the vehicle’s encapsulating fairing. Unfortunately, this buckling was enough to interfere with the Agena’s staging, as a segment of the bracket impacted the nozzle as the stages separated. The resulting damage to the nozzle continued to worsen over the Agena’s burn until the stage became uncontrollable, resulting in a mission failure. However, ALS’s experience in integration paid off, and the interstage was redesigned with increased structural strength (though at the cost of slightly higher weight), and the second stage Castor design was re-examined to minimize the potential for serious thrust oscillation. With these improvements (as well as resolution of other teething issues), Carrack quickly began to earn a reputation as a reliable, capable, and cheap launcher, launching twice in the first year, and four in the next. Larger Caravel launches were shifted to lower-end Carracks of equivalent capacity, and the first of a new mid-sized generation of satellites were flying on the largest Carracks by 1994, posing a challenge to attempts to commercialize the low end of the Delta 4000 range. With shrewd use of existing hardware and minimization of development, ALS had once again proved that dedicated spaceflight firms could exist and even profit in the competitive market--proof to the existing players that they would have to step up their game, and a development eagerly studied by some considering getting into the field.
Which works out to something like $5,000/kg
