Orbital ATK [OA] wants to use some 750 stored detached ballistic missile solid rocket motors for commercial launches, but a 17-year-old law precludes the government assets from being used for such purposes.
Currently, Hill AFB, Utah, and Navajo Army Depot in Arizona house 426 Minuteman 2 motors, 154 Minuteman 3 motors and 176 Peacekeeper motors, according to Randy Riddle, Chief of Rocket Systems Launch Program Engineering and Development at Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center (AFSMC). Orbital ATK has been launching the Minotaurs since 1997 under the U.S. Air Force’s Orbital/Suborbital Program-1 (OSP-1) contract. The company then won OSP-2 in 2003. Through these contracts, Orbital ATK fit 25 Minotaurs with the detached motors and delivered them all during military space and missile defense target launches, Mark Pieczynski, Vice President of Strategy and Business Development for Orbital ATK’s Flight Systems Group, told sister publication NS&D Monitor. The OSP contracting effort started after the Air Force retired the Minuteman 2 in 1997. The service retired Peacekeeper in 2005, and AFSMC has received retired Minuteman 3 rocket motors since 2012.
Supported by 385 U.S. suppliers for the Minotaur program, according to Orbital ATK spokeswoman Trina Helquist, the company is looking to integrate the motors on Minotaurs for commercial launches, but the Commercial Space Act of 1998 strictly relegates the assets to government use. Pieczynski claimed that the United States is missing onshore launch opportunities by essentially barring the ICBM motors from commercial use, letting other nations capitalize on small- to medium-sized rocket launches—some on U.S. soil—in the burgeoning commercial space sector. “In the Minotaur class, there’s a pretty steady state market worldwide of about maybe four to five launches a year, and it’s very unfortunate that we cannot compete for those launches because these assets cannot be used today for commercial purposes,” Pieczynski said. “So we face a dilemma here.” Orbital ATK does the final integration for all iridium satellites in Gilbert, Ariz., approximately 15 miles away from the company’s Launch Systems Division, but the company cannot launch the technology using the government’s excess ICBM assets, Pieczynski said. Perhaps ironically, Russian company ISC Kosmotras this summer will conduct the first Iridium satellite launch on a Dnepr, a rocket that utilizes Russian legacy ICBM motors.
Furthermore, foreign governments subsidize launch vehicles made by home-based companies, allowing those companies to offer lower launch prices. According to Orbital ATK, in a competition between it and Arianespace to launch the follow-on Skybox imaging satellites, Arianespace’s Vega small launch vehicle won against Orbital ATK’s commercial version of Minotaur, the Minotaur C, by “substantially underbidding” Orbital ATK in price.
The point in question over the controversial law hit the Senate floor during debate of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016 twice this month. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) on June 15 re-submitted an amendment he first filed on June 9 that would have required the Government Accountability Office within a year of the bill’s passage to submit to Congress a report on the viability, cost, savings, and the impacts on the Defense Department of allowing excess ballistic missile solid rocket motors to be available for commercial applications, a congressional staffer told NS&D Monitor. The amendment failed as senators approved cloture on the NDAA before Flake could offer the amendment. The amendment specifically identified Orbital ATK’s Minotaur launch vehicles.
While Orbital ATK is interested in leveraging excess ICBM assets for commercial launch competitions, spokespeople from SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (ULA) did not respond to NS&D Monitor requests for comment on considerations for competing for commercial launches that would involve the motors. ULA is a joint venture of Boeing [BA] and Lockheed Martin [LMT]. Pieczynski said because no other U.S. launch provider maintains a comparable launch vehicle in Minotaur’s class, no other company would “be threatened” with Orbital ATK’s existing launch vehicles, which is likely to equate to sparse industry opposition to commercialization. The merger between ATK and Orbital Sciences earlier this year helped to reconcile clashing corporate opinions about commercialization of ICBM assets.
“ATK was an opponent in the past of the commercialization of these excess assets because they believed that it would take away from their ability to produce new solid rocket motors for the commercial market and sell those to Orbital for use,” he said. “The fact of the matter is that’s never developed because the price competitiveness with newly produced solid rocket motors simply is not there with the overseas market as its price today, so what’s changed is we’ve merged with ATK, so now we’re Orbital ATK, and I think a prior opponent being the ATK organization of the commercialization of excess assets now understands that there is not a competitive market for commercially produced motors in this class, and that the right answer is to allow for the commercial use of the excess ICBMs.”
Pieczynski said he didn’t expect his company would partner with anyone, touting Orbital ATK’s expertise in the small- to medium-sized rocket market. He added that commercialization of the legacy ICBM assets open business opportunities for other small launch providers. “We’ve done this more than a couple dozen times relative to converting these assets into space launch, so don’t think there’s anybody we would partner with, but certainly if there’s a policy change or a book of law that changes the use of these for commercial purposes, I certainly would anticipate that anybody in small launch would have the ability to go use these assets in the same manner that we’re using these assets, so it ought to open up the door for others as well,” Pieczynski said.
One industry official told NS&D Monitor that a two-month-old corporate lobbying effort aimed at highlighting the potential business and geopolitical benefits of U.S. commercialization of legacy ICBM assets has piqued the interest of national lawmakers. The effort was “predicated on the fact that discussion about these launches going to Russia,” the official said. “It was suggested by certain folks in the government that this might be a really good time to go and readdress this whole issue.”
Pieczynski said he hoped his company could start working on integrating ICBM motors for commercial launch within one year, realistically, but it could take upward of thrice that amount of time to complete a commercial mission. “Our normal mission timeline for these small launch kind of missions is two to three years, so if [excess ICBM motors] were to open that, we think it still would take us another two to three years to put a mission together,” Riddle said. Pieczynski also specified NASA science launches as an commercial area his company would pursue, but with excess ICBM motors’ current designation, approval would be a lengthy process that could be activated only based on government need.
NASA is amid its second “Launch Services Contract” (NLS-2), a firm-fixed-price arrangement set to run from 2010 to 2020, Jim Norman, NASA Director of Launch Services, told NS&D Monitor. It’s a “big contract with multiple providers, and we compete each launch under that contract,” he said. The Commercial Space Act contains rare case-by-case exceptions that would allow the use of certain government assets for commercial purposes, including if “cost effective space transportation services that meet specific mission requirements would not be reasonably available from United States commercial providers when required,” the law states. Additionally, another section of the act prohibits the conversion of excess ICBM rocket motors to a “space transportation vehicle configuration,” unless the involved federal agency certifies several criteria to Congress, including assurance of cost savings. Even if those military motors proved cost-effective, certification would be a long process, Norman said. “The federal government/NASA can use a Minotaur, but it’s a difficult process by which to go get a determination by the NASA Administrator to be able to use one because there are certain exceptions under the law….It’s not a period of days; it’s not a period of a couple of weeks. It takes awhile,” Norman said.
As government and industry sort out their plans and the legal process for commercializing excess ICBM motors, the Air Force is destroying nonfunctional motors, Riddle said. “[I]n the case where we’re destroying motors, we go look at the motors that are oldest and/or suspect for some reason and identify those that require destroying,” he said. AFSMC has destroyed 17 motors since December, Riddle said. Recently, the center has destructed approximately 12 per quarter, or four to five per month, he said. ASRC Federal Space and Defense has been assisting AFSMC in its inertial verification and validation (IV&V) of these motors since December, succeeding TASC corporation as IV&V contractor. TASC was purchased by Engility [EGL] earlier this year. Orbital ATK is the aging surveillance contractor for the assets, Riddle said.
While Minuteman 2, Minuteman 3 and Peacekeeper rocket motors have powered 101 total AFSMC government launch missions, Riddle said, the Air Force is exploring the possibility of using “ridesharing missions” to add to that total. The missions would involve sending smaller “research-and-development-type” satellites into orbit, but considerations are slow going as the Air Force works to clarify and apply the laws that would govern such launches, he said. “We’re slowly working our way through the logic of how we would do something like that, if we were able to put together some kind of a rideshare scenario, where we could use some of our government motors, basically, to provide for the government side of a rideshare mission while allowing the commercial launch provider to fly a second commercial payload, basically, on the same rocket with a commercial customer picking up the rest of the launch,” he said. “We have to make sure that we stay fully compliant with the law and policies and all between that to get to that point, so there’s a lot of work that would have to be done to get there.”