Sea Launch Done, Air Launch Ahead
A Ukrainian Zenit rocket was successfully launched the Friday before last from a floating platform in the Pacific, putting into orbit a United Arab Emirates’ Thuraya telecommunications satellite as part of the Sea Launch program. The Thuraya Company, worth an estimated $500 million, will provide cellular phone communications via the launched satellite with over a hundred countries of the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Europe.
Ukraine can be happy. Whatever the case, not all countries with endemic economic (and other) problems can boast competitive achievements in the realm of space. Volodymyr Komanov, deputy general designer at M. K. Yanhel Pivdenny Design Bureau, told The Day that Ukrainian and Russian rocket scientists can be proud now at least of having managed to hold out despite of the problems that have haunted them for a decade. Mr. Komanov extolled the rocketeers, saying, “We don’t go and ask our presidents to pay us our salaries.” But the main thing, according to the Pivdenny representative, is that Sea Launch makes a profit. However, Mr. Komanov is sure, this profit is far smaller than “we deserved.” If the Zenit were to be launched from, say, Baikonur (the rocket was in fact designed for being launched from this site), the number of satellite customers would be much greater, as would be the funds earned. While Sea Launch allows “four, six, or eight launches,” Baikonur offers an “unlimited” number of them. As to the reasons why the rocket launch was postponed last week, Mr. Komanov noted: “Failures always happen. In any case, even launching one rocket involves a great number of people and various systems. Yet, I think every accident is caused by the human factor.” Most of the blame for aborted launches is being laid on the rocket manufacturer, the Ukrainian side.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian-Russian space cooperation is not confined to Sea Launch alone. The Dnipro Project, now under active development and partially implemented, reveals the multifaceted prospects of this cooperation as well as the impossibility of prosperity for the rocketeers of one country without the assistance of the other. The slogan, together into the twenty-first space century, became the leitmotif of the second Ukrainian-Russian meeting held in Moscow by the joint efforts of Suzirya (Constellation), a Ukrainian youth aerospace association, and the administration of Koroliev, a town in Moscow oblast. The meeting, attended by cosmonauts, scientists, and space equipment designers, was dedicated to the memory of Vladimir Utkin, one of the founders our nation’s astronautics. Incidentally, it is he who put forward the idea of modernizing and commercially reusing, rather than destroying, carrier-rockets. This applies, first of all, to the Dnipro program which employs the RS-20 (also known as SS-18 and Satan in the West) modified intercontinental ballistic missiles for putting satellites into orbit.
Also discussed at the Ukrainian-Russian meeting was the Air Launch project which can increase the current profits of the Ukrainian and Russian space industries. Ukrainian and Russian companies are now working on a satellite launch system based on the Progress rocket to be launched from the An-124 aircraft. Rockets will first be parachute-dropped at the altitude of about 11 km and only then the rocket engines will be fired. It is planned to carry out the first launch of this kind in 2003. The Russian air companies Poliot and Energia, and our Antonov Design Bureau are working to modernize the An-124 aircraft and prepare it for launching rockets. It is intended to launch in this way satellites weighing up to 2.5 tons. It is also forecast that the Air Launch system will reduce the cost of putting a one kilogram payload into orbit to five or six thousand dollars, instead of $25-30,000 in the usual terrestrial launches and seven to nine thousand in Sea Launch. One of the organizers of the Together into the Twenty-First Century meeting in Moscow, Suzirya Society President Oleh Petrov, pointed out that “any project moves on very simply: if funded, it will be done; if not funded, it will fizzle out.”
THE DAY’S REFERENCE
Summer 1993: The first negotiations are held between companies of the US (Boeing), Norway (Kvarner), Russia (Energia space rocket company), and Ukraine (Pivdenny Design Bureau and Pivdenmash Plant) to start the Sea Launch joint project.
Spring 1994: The Sea Launch initiative begins to be studied.
April 1995: Sea Launch is set up.
December 1995: The first order was placed by Hughes.
March 1999: The first launch was carried out with a dummy payload aboard.
October 1999: The first commercial launch, DIRECTV 1-R, was carried out.
