Word: launch
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Titans of the 1990s. The past nine months have been hard ones for the Titan booster, now made by Lockheed-Martin, and for the U.S. launch industry as a whole. During that time, three Titan 4s--direct offspring of the reliable Titan 2--were launched, carrying satellites worth hundreds of millions of dollars. All three flopped spectacularly--one committing an explosive suicide 41 seconds after liftoff, the others misfiring and stranding their satellites in useless orbits. Three other rockets--Lockheed's sleek new Athena 2, and a pair of boosters from Boeing's new Delta 3 class--also conspicuously fizzled...
Rocket scientists and Wall Street analysts characterized the catastrophes as a spectacular run of bad luck. But the losses--the launch vehicles and the satellites they were carrying cost at least $3.5 billion--come at a time when the industry is simultaneously consolidating, introducing new technology and trying to boost the number of annual launches to meet rising demand. That's not a prescription for smooth sailing. "It could be a string of bad luck," says Pierre Chao, an analyst for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. "Or they are doing so many launches that something slipped...
Just what that something was may be hard to pinpoint. Of the six launch fiascoes, three involved new, profit-driven rockets: the bulked-up Delta 3, with twice the lift-off muscle of its Delta 2 ancestor; and the Athena 2, a smaller rocket with less propulsive oomph but a bargain price tag. The most recent Titan flub appears to involve misfirings of the rocket's upper stage, a $1.23 billion mistake that may have been caused by badly loaded software. Other miscues have included everything from an electrical short, which caused another Titan to explode, to faulty guidance, which...
...maturity of its work force. If there's any consolation for both companies, it's that they probably have a little breathing room before things really start to close in. Satellite makers know that space flight is a tricky business, and they must factor in a 5% to 10% launch-failure rate. And hitching a ride into space aboard some other country's rocket is not easy. Russia knows the space game, but federal quotas limit the number of U.S. satellites that can ride Russian rockets. Europe's Ariane provides a far better alternative, but that rocket appears...
Among these fledgling projects is the launch of a PON "virtual community," which allows interaction through the Internet between members of the program, who are from various universities. In addition to Harvard, scholars from MIT, Tufts University and the Simmons Graduate School of Management participate in the program. The initiative will allow PON members to interact much more easily, Cobb said...