Stratolaunch Systems is “very likely” to use more than two multi-stage boosters on its carrier aircraft in a response to market demands for smaller satellites, Executive Director Chuck Beames told Defense Daily Friday.
The announcement is a dramatic departure from the company’s original plan of launching one multi-stage booster from its massive 385-foot wingspan carrier aircraft. Beames said development of the multi-stage booster has been paused for about six or seven months as “teams and teams” of Stratolaunch employees evaluate different launch vehicle designs for different classes of satellites.
“We’re looking at it from a standpoint of ‘What’s the smartest business move,’” Beames said in a telephone interview leading up to the National Space Symposium (NSS) in Colorado Springs, Colo., starting Monday.
Beames said Stratolaunch wants to engineer solutions that are best for the launch market place and where the company sees it moving in the next 20 years, which he said is toward smaller satellites. Beames cited what he called a revolution in low earth orbit (LEO), a domain that he said was once exclusive to the national security community and the International Space Station (ISS). Beames said low scales of cost can be obtained if companies “smartly network” satellites in the closer-in LEO rather farther away geostationary earth orbit (GEO).
Stratolaunch, Beames said, has also not decided whether the multi-stage boosters will be solid or liquid vehicles. He said the company is looking at attributes ranging from quickest to market to export ease to best or worse for the environment. Despite the pause on booster development, Beames said Stratolaunch is still aiming for a 2018 first multi-stage booster vehicle launch.
Stratolaunch told reporters on a January tour of one of its Mojave, Calif., hangars that the carrier aircraft was almost 40 percent complete and on track for a 2016 first flight goal. Scaled Composites President Kevin Mickey said in January the company had also built about 80 percent of the aircraft’s composites by weight. Stratolaunch is composed of Northrop Grumman [NOC] subsidiary Scaled Composites and Orbital ATK [OA].
Mickey said in January that critical to the carrier aircraft’s 2016 first flight was assembly of the “center-main wing,” which was to hoist the single multi-stage booster. Beames didn’t say Friday whether the multiple smaller multi-stage boosters would be launched from the center wing. The carrier aircraft will weigh more than 1.3 million pounds, which Stratolaunch calls the largest aircraft ever constructed. The company says the carrier aircraft will be able to fly over 1,000 nautical miles and carry 550,000 pounds worth of boosters.
Stratolaunch’s entire air launch system is composed of four components: carrier aircraft, multi-stage booster, a mating and integration system and an orbital payload. Scaled Composites is building the carrier aircraft while Orbital ATK is designing, assembling and testing the 120-foot long multi-stage booster. Orbital ATK will also provide program management, systems engineering, space launch mission design, system integration and integrated support for the entire air launch system (Defense Daily, Jan. 22).