By Marina Malenic
LONDON–The U.S. solid rocket motor industrial base must be consolidated after years of continued overcapacity, the Pentagon’s top industrial policy official said this week.
“We are looking at ways to right-size the industry,” Brett Lambert told reporters at the Farnborough Airshow on July 19. “We should have squeezed out that capacity 10 years ago.”
Lambert added, however, that the department intends to provide a minimum level of support so that key knowledge and skills resident in the sector can be maintained. He said a detailed funding plan is to be included in the president’s FY ’12 budget request, which will be sent to Congress early next year.
ATK [ATK] and Aerojet [GY] are the Pentagon’s two prime contractors in the sector.
“Industry realizes it is over capacity,” Lambert said.
The Pentagon’s industrial policy shop completed a draft report on the issue in June. A final version is expected in September.
Earlier this week, the Senate Commerce Committee unanimously approved a NASA authorization bill that would direct the agency to begin building a heavy-lift rocket now instead of President Obama’s previous target date of 2015. The White House issued a statement in support of the legislation (Defense Daily, July 16).
The Obama administration’s FY ’11 NASA budget request calls for eliminating Constellation, a space-shuttle-replacement effort intended to return astronauts to the moon that has included the developmental Ares I launch vehicle and Orion crew capsule and future Ares V heavy-lift rocket.
However, during an April speech in Florida, the president pledged to begin building a new heavy-lift rocket, a replacement to Ares V, by 2015. The NASA authorization bill the Senate Commerce Committee marked up this week would modify the April plan. The bill sets a target date for re-starting manned space flights of 2016, instead of 2025 as the White House had proposed, and calls for immediately building a heavy-lift rocket in support of that effort (Defense Daily, June 3).
Other NASA supporters in Congress have also raised concerns about the status of the solid rocket industrial base, and the Pentagon’s reliance on it. A House Armed Services Committee (HASC) report accompanying the House’s version of the FY ’11 Defense Authorization Bill criticizes the Pentagon for failing to unveil a plan for sustaining the solid rocket motor industrial base, as required by the FY ’10 defense act.
That report says action is needed to sustain deployed strategic and missile defense systems and to maintain “an intellectual and engineering capacity to support the next- generation rocket motors.” It notes that because of Constellation’s cancellation the cost of propulsion systems could increase from 40 to 100 percent, because the Pentagon may have to assume all infrastructure costs that it currently shares with NASA.