Boeing's Delta IV Heavy Gets Ready for its Close-Up

Boeing's Delta IV Heavy Gets Ready for its Close-Up

By Jason Bates
Space News Staff Writer

The upcoming demonstration of Boeing’s heavy-lift Delta 4 rocket will feature a booster-separation event soon after liftoff and a long-duration main-engine burn during which the thrust will be throttled up, down and back up again.

Those are the major differences between the flight profile of the heavy-lift Delta 4 and the standard variant, said Dan Collins, vice president of Boeing Expendable Launch Systems of Huntington Beach, Calif. The heavy-lift vehicle, with three core stages in a side-by-side configuration, is designed to loft up to 13,000 kilograms to geosynchronous-transfer orbit, twice the capacity of its single-core cousin.

The demonstration flight, which will carry an instrumented payload to measure vehicle performance, is on track for Dec. 10 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., Collins said. "We are 70 to 80 percent confident” of that date, he said. "There's always the possibility we may find something that wasn't quite what we expected and could give us a little bit of a hiccup, but we're pretty good at working things out."

The Delta 4 rocket family was developed under the U.S. Air Force Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program. Boeing has launched a medium-lift version of it three times, giving engineers good data on the performance of the vehicle’s RS-68 core-stage engine -- the first large, liquid-fueled rocket engine developed in the United States in more than 20 years, Collins said.

"We have a good idea after three launches of how the common booster cores will react," Collins said.

The two strap-on booster cores will be jettisoned about 100 seconds into the mission, Collins said. The engine in the center booster core, which supports the vehicle’s upper stage and payload, will be throttled down for the separation event and then powered back up to fire for another 100 seconds, he said.

The center core’s RS-68 will burn for a total of about 330 seconds, about 70 seconds longer than the engine fired during previous flights, Collins said. The mission also marks the debut of Boeing's 5-meter fairing, he said.

The Air Force and Boeing will review the data gathered by the satellite in preparation for the first Air Force launch, a Defense Support Program missile warning satellite scheduled for fall 2005, Collins said.

"We've given ourselves plenty of time to make the normal types of adjustments you would see after a first flight,” Collins said. "I think with a successful payload separation of [the demonstration satellite], there will not be any issue with launching" the Defense Support Program satellite.

The Air Force is paying Boeing between $140 million and $170 million for the demonstration mission, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation. Collins would not confirm the price of the launch.

The heavy-lift Delta 4 was designed primarily for lofting large U.S. military payloads into orbit, but Boeing remains hopeful that other markets will develop.

The commercial market for the EELV rockets as a whole has collapsed, and the heavy-lift vehicles were designed mainly with the Air Force in mind, said Phil McAlister, program manager for the space and telecommunications industry analysis unit at Bethesda, Md.-based Futron Corp.

"On the commercial side, there is no demand for a big launcher right now or in the next five years," McAlister said. "None of the private-equity guys [who have purchased several large commercial satellite operators] are looking at monster satellites, especially if the only ride is on a relatively unproven rocket.

"Collins said the most likely market for the heavy-lift Delta 4 outside the Air Force is NASA's new space exploration initiative, which is targeting manned missions to the moon by 2020 and eventually missions to Mars.

"As NASA looks toward their exploration initiatives, here's a heavy-lift vehicle that will be flight proven," Collins said. "When looking at program as complex as the exploration program is going to be, to know that you're starting from a foundation that isn't a paper rocket, but has flown successfully, just brings a lot of confidence."

"NASA and the moon and Mars missions are the wild card," McAlister said. "Nobody knows how to handicap the market right now, but it's something everybody is looking at."

One thing that Station has taught us that while it's possible to do on-orbit assembly, it's not desirable. It increases risk and cost. It creates numerous problems of its own. The real lesson of ISS is to minimize on-orbit assembly. Developing a real Heavy Lift vehicle does just that.

I have read that this very point was one of two that brought Von Braun around to the LOR concept for Apollo, having been previously an apostle of EOR. The other being the massive size of the landing vehicle that would be wrought by going the EOR route. All very valid points. The challenges of assembly in zero gravity vacuum are quite daunting compared with tinkering things together in a terrestrial environment. That's not to say it can't be done, because we and others have done it. It's just lot more bother.

I agree -- fuel is the obvious commodity to do first. The Moon has copious oxygen (it's 40% oxygen by weight) and this can be extracted by any number of common, industrial methods. Even if there were no hydrogen there (although there is), oxygen is 4/5 of the mass of a hydrogen-oxygen rocket fuel load. The payback comes very quickly.

The Moon has lots of aluminum oxide. Why not use solar power to separate it into oxygen and aluminum. Then build a rocket that uses powdered aluminum fuel with liquid oxygen oxidizer? That way you wouldn't need to use hydrogen.

Nah, t'weren't cost effective. It's how the libs managed to kill the moon program in the first place. "Save those billions money for the CHILDREN!" ><

If we're going to get stuff to the moon in large quantities, we have to find something better than chemical rockets.

We lost a lot of heavy-lift capability when we cut our own throats closing down that program.

We didn't "cut our own throats." The unpleasant truth is that there was no market for such a heavy-lift booster once Congress shut down the moon program. Nor is there even a significant market for the Delta IV -- and that includes no commercial market for that much throw weight.

For any meaningful activity in space, expendables are a dead end. Besides that, expendables are just plain stupid, an example of continuing to do things wrong simply because you didn't have time to do it right the first time.

But the aerospace companies love expendables because they get to sell a whole new rocket for every mission. For that reason alone, letting them develop anything reusable is the fox guarding the henhouse.

Now, I'm nothing but a regular guy, but from what I have read, the "reusable" space shuttle costs about $500,000,000 a mission, to put up 15 metric tons of cargo. Accoring to this article, a demo mission for a Delta runs from 140 - 170 million. Even if we assume a significantly higher cost of $200,000,000 for a real flight, it looks like it is a heck of a lot cheaper per ton to launch 13 MT into orbit for 200 than 15 MT into space for 500.

I'm very willing to be educated here, but it looks to me like the disposables are the lower cost way to go, and the existing shuttle program the real boondoggle.

So, 25% of the capability of a Saturn V for LEO? Again, it still seems like we're dealing with midgets here. I really don't understand why this country goes through all the trouble to develop some really good things and then just drops the ball. Seems a shame to waste all that effort when we could have been doing some really exciting things in the meantime if we had used the treasures we worked to put into our own hands.

How about a coat of paint and a few patches on the 3 S5's in Huntsville, Cape C and Houston?

It'd be far cheaper to build from scratch. NONE of the Saturn V support infrastructure exists anymore, and NONE of the electronics on the boosters themselves has been manufactured for decades.

The heavy-lift vehicle, with three core stages in a side-by-side configuration, is designed to loft up to 13,000 kilograms to geosynchronous-transfer orbit, twice the capacity of its single-core cousin.

Sounds like three of these could put up a nice battlestation in geosync orbit.

Now, I'm nothing but a regular guy, but from what I have read, the "reusable" space shuttle costs about $500,000,000 a mission, to put up 15 metric tons of cargo.

Actually, no -- the Shuttle system regularly launches 250,000 lb into LEO. Problem is that 200,000 lb of that weight flies back for a landing.

The mass fraction for any reusable system is going to be similar, which is why reusables are probably never going to be cost-effective for placing large masses into orbit.

Another cost-increaser for reusables is that the intrinsic reliability numbers have to be much higher than for a single-shot expendable.

Your response is consistant with my observation, so I would assume that I'm not really missing something.

One other thing to add is that reusables become progressively more difficult to maintain as they age simply because of technology changes. Maintenance of the space shuttle requires engineers to constantly try to scavenge for parts like 8088s and 80286s - stuff that was very available at the time of construction but rather hard to find now.

Disposables, on the other hand, could be more or less continuosly upgraded with newer parts, with new hardware replacing old as newer technology becomes available. It's not like it's going to have to be maintained, right? So, in affect, a long term order of disposables could result in reduced cost per ton over existing launches, not only because of improved capacity utilization of manufacturing facilities, but also because of the judicious use of improving lower cost technology.

Actually, not quite. Shuttle guys are scavenging 8088s and 80286s for maintenance of the ground support equipment. Your alternative raises the challenge of trying to keep all of the instrumentation up to date and consistent with the older H/W on the boosters. It's far cheaper to find and replace old Intel chips than it is to continuously rebuild, re-test, and re-qualify new ground support equipment.

So, in affect, a long term order of disposables could result in reduced cost per ton over existing launches, not only because of improved capacity utilization of manufacturing facilities, but also because of the judicious use of improving lower cost technology.

Probably correct. The Russians demonstrated that economies of scale are real when they launched something like 1500 Soyuz boosters over the span of about 30 years -- that's something like 6 launches per month!

But that also points out the problem: there's simply no market right now for anything close to that sort of launch rate. These days the Atlas and Delta guys are lucky if they get 6 launches per year. You just can't get economies of scale when your launch rate is so low.

I'm very willing to be educated here, but it looks to me like the disposables are the lower cost way to go, and the existing shuttle program the real boondoggle.

The existing shuttle is a perfect example how not to do a reusable. The initial idea was fine, but nearly every decision made in its development was a bad one.

When developing a reusable, you have to keep an eye on the operational maintenance you are going to need. Shuttle management did a very poor job of this when it was being developed.

While the initial idea was to lower recurring launch costs, very little attention was paid to doing that during actual development.

In addition, the shuttle is hideously inflexible as far as the flight rate, which pretty soundly negates its reason for existence in the first place.

If you are going to assume a very low flight rate and an infinite maintenance budget, there is absolutely no reason to develop a reusable, expendables will work fine.

The problem is that our aspirations and goals simply can not be met by expendables (or stupidly developed reusables.) We are planning on doing a lot in space, to do that with current hardware and architectures, NASA would have to have a budget comparable to the Department of Defense.

The mass fraction for any reusable system is going to be similar, which is why reusables are probably never going to be cost-effective for placing large masses into orbit.

How much mass makes it to orbit is essentially a fuel cost if you are talking about any reasonably designed reusable. In any likely reusable scenario in the near future, fuel cost is lost in the noise.

Ideally, reusables would be used for launching personnel, since you want the reliability anyway for that and the large masses would be mined and manufactured off-planet.

, fuel cost is lost in the noise

I'm talking about structure mass, not fuel cost. The fuel mass (and related tankage) is governed by whatever mass has to be placed into orbit.

The only real question remaining is: how much of the mass placed on-orbit is going to have to come back home? For reusables, it means a lot of structure (and volume), which obviously takes away from the amount of actual payload you can carry to orbit.

The Shuttle-C concept was attractive for the simple reason that the design used an expendable fairing and main engines. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it seems to me that you gained about 100,000 lb to LEO.

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