It Is Rocket Science!

By Jeffrey Kluger

The Gemini astronauts of the 1960s never much cared for flying into space atop a Titan 2 rocket. Originally built as a military missile, the Titan had a tendency to leap off the pad and scream into orbit with a suddenness that plastered even the most hardened pilot against his seat. Punishing as the Titans of the 1960s were, however, there was one thing you could say for them: they got where they were going.

Not so the Titans of the 1990s. The past nine months have been hard ones for the Titan booster, now made by Lockheed-Martin, and for the U.S. launch industry as a whole. During that time, three Titan 4s--direct offspring of the reliable Titan 2--were launched, carrying satellites worth hundreds of millions of dollars. All three flopped spectacularly--one committing an explosive suicide 41 seconds after liftoff, the others misfiring and stranding their satellites in useless orbits. Three other rockets--Lockheed's sleek new Athena 2, and a pair of boosters from Boeing's new Delta 3 class--also conspicuously fizzled. Three of the six failures occurred in the past three weeks alone.

Rocket scientists and Wall Street analysts characterized the catastrophes as a spectacular run of bad luck. But the losses--the launch vehicles and the satellites they were carrying cost at least $3.5 billion--come at a time when the industry is simultaneously consolidating, introducing new technology and trying to boost the number of annual launches to meet rising demand. That's not a prescription for smooth sailing. "It could be a string of bad luck," says Pierre Chao, an analyst for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. "Or they are doing so many launches that something slipped."

Just what that something was may be hard to pinpoint. Of the six launch fiascoes, three involved new, profit-driven rockets: the bulked-up Delta 3, with twice the lift-off muscle of its Delta 2 ancestor; and the Athena 2, a smaller rocket with less propulsive oomph but a bargain price tag. The most recent Titan flub appears to involve misfirings of the rocket's upper stage, a $1.23 billion mistake that may have been caused by badly loaded software. Other miscues have included everything from an electrical short, which caused another Titan to explode, to faulty guidance, which similarly doomed a Delta 3.

With no single problem common to all the failures, many believe the place to look for answers is less in the guts of the missiles than in the offices of the companies launching them. A wave of defense-industry mergers has resulted in handoffs of businesses ranging from cruise missiles to space stations. Another problem may be brain drain. As the wizened engineers who first got the country into space have retired--or been downsized--they've often been replaced by younger, lower-cost ones. "Lockheed-Martin has been stitched together like Frankenstein's monster," says John Pike, an analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. "[This has] got to raise questions about corners being cut."

Lockheed and Boeing reject this analysis, although Lockheed has named a panel to look into everything that affects production, including scheduling pressures and the maturity of its work force. If there's any consolation for both companies, it's that they probably have a little breathing room before things really start to close in. Satellite makers know that space flight is a tricky business, and they must factor in a 5% to 10% launch-failure rate. And hitching a ride into space aboard some other country's rocket is not easy. Russia knows the space game, but federal quotas limit the number of U.S. satellites that can ride Russian rockets. Europe's Ariane provides a far better alternative, but that rocket appears to be a victim of its own success, booked all but solid for the immediate future. "The winner is Ariane," says Chao, "but they're up to their eyeballs in work."

Despite this, customers are making it known that they won't put up with failure for long. Recently the U.S. Air Force informally approached NASA about launching national-security payloads aboard the shuttle. And last week the Administration apparently okayed the launch of a private satellite aboard a Chinese Long March rocket.

Unlucky or not, this is the worst losing streak for the launch industry in the past 13 years, since the Challenger explosion drove skittish customers away. And with each new pratfall the domestic fleet suffers, the U.S. share of the launch market looks shakier still. In the 1980s, the U.S. controlled 75% of the world's commercial-launch business; that figure is now about 45%, with new competitors on the horizon. "Until Lockheed and Boeing sort out the glitches," warns Marco Caceres, an analyst for the Teal Group in Fairfax, Va., "they are not going to compete."

--Reported by Sally Donnelly/Washington and Bill Syken/New York