Tim Furniss/LONDON
Lockheed Martin has formed an independent panel of experts to conduct a comprehensive review of programme management, engineering, manufacturing processes and quality control procedures at its space divisions following a series of recent launch failures.
In addition, the US Air Force is conducting a broad area review of Air Force space launch capabilities following three successive launch failures of its satellites by Lockheed Martin Titan flights. The USAF review will analyse the cause of the failures, recommend changes in practices, procedures and operations to prevent future failures.
Lockheed Martin's panel, which will be headed by Thomas Young, former president and chief operating officer of Martin Marietta, will report its findings by 1 September. The review will focus on Lockheed Martin's launch vehicle operations, but will include operations in other space sector programmes.
"Although our mission success rate as a corporation has been in the range of 97%, it's also clear that recent launch vehicle missions have not met their objectives," says Pete Teets, Lockheed Martin president and chief operating officer.
The formation of the review panel follows the latest Lockheed Martin Athena and Titan launch failures. The solid-propellant Athena suffered its second failure in five launches on 28 April when the first Space Imaging Ikonos commercial remote-sensing satellite burnt up in the atmosphere over the South Pacific Ocean.
The Athena 2 booster's aluminium-lithium, two-piece payload fairing failed to separate between second-stage shutdown and third-stage ignition, 4min 27s after lift-off from Vandenberg AFB, California. The booster failed to generate orbital velocity after the third stage firing, heading southwards towards Antarctica.
There have been three two-stage Athena 1 flights, with one failure, and two by the three-stage Athena 2, also with one failure. Space Imaging hopes to launch its second 650kg, 1m-resolution satellite on an Athena 2 later this year, and another Athena 2 is scheduled to make the first flight from the Alaska Spaceport on Kodiak Island next year, carrying NASA's Vegetation Canopy Lidar satellite.
Meanwhile, the US Air Force's first Lockheed Martin-built Milstar 2 geostationary military-communications satellite was left stranded in a useless orbit, with an apogee of only 4,997km and a perigee of 740km, after a Lockheed Martin Titan 3B launch on 30 April.
The Centaur upper stage of the 3B apparently ignited three times in the first 90min of the flight, when it should have made firings over a period of 6h. The first planned burn apparently did not fire correctly.
The other burns may have been automatically commanded, but also cut off prematurely. The satellite was then deployed 4h earlier than planned.
The US Air Force indicated that the upper stage failure may have been caused by software or guidance system malfunctions and written off the Milstar.
The loss of the $800 million satellite and the $433 million launch, added to the costs incurred by a Titan 3B/inertial upper stage (IUS) booster failure on 10 April - stranding a DSP early warning satellite - and the loss of the final Titan 3A rocket with an electronic intelligence satellite on 12 August last year, brings to $3.4 billion the losses incurred by the USAF in three successive failed Titan 4 launches.
The USAF believes that the Titan/DSP failure may have been caused by an imperfect separation of the two IUS stages, resulting in a second-stage engine firing dragging along a partially attached first stage (Flight International, 21-27 April).
Source: Flight International
