By Marina Malenic
Lockheed Martin [LMT] and ATK [ATK] yesterday announced a teaming agreement to manufacture a modernized Athena rocket that could support both civil and military space launches.
The new Athena will come with both two-stage and three-stage versions and will be available for launches beginning in 2012, said Al Simpson, the Lockheed Martin program manager for Athena.
“As we look at where our customers are going, we decided to revive the Athena to help address some of their industrial base concerns,” Simpson told Defense Daily.
Air Force officials and lawmakers have recently raised concerns about the space industrial base and the cost of future launches in the wake of the Obama administration’s decision to cancel the NASA Constellation program (Defense Daily, March 12).
The new Athena will be able to carry payloads of up to 1.8 tons for NASA, the Defense Department and other agencies, according to Simpson.
Under the joint venture, Lockheed Martin will provide mission management, payload integration and launch operations, while ATK will supply the rocket motors and infrastructure and will run launch site operations.
The rockets will use the new CASTOR-30 upper stage motor and will carry upgraded electronic systems. CASTOR is a family of solid-fuel rocket motors built by ATK, which also manufactures the space shuttle’s twin solid rocket boosters.
The Athena can be launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., the Kodiak Launch Complex in Alaska, Vandenberg AFB, Calif., and NASA Wallops Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia.
Simpson said the new rocket would be affordable.
“The new Athena family will fill an industry need for lift capability in this payload range,” he added. “There is clearly a growing need for responsive launch capabilities for all of these agencies.”
First-generation Athena I and II rockets became operational in 1995 and have flown seven times. Athena II, the only commercially developed launch vehicle to fly a lunar mission, launched the Lunar Prospector to the moon in 1998.