Word: titanics
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...research group to pioneer supersonic aerodynamics and thin-shell-stability theory for ballistic missiles. At the university's prestigious Jet Propulsion Lab, he helped design Private A, the first U.S. solid-fuel missile that worked. Then he was invited into the U.S. Army as a colonel to fashion the Titan ICBM, workhorse of the cold war silo-missile force...
...Gemini astronauts of the 1960s never much cared for flying into space atop a Titan 2 rocket. Originally built as a military missile, the Titan had a tendency to leap off the pad and scream into orbit with a suddenness that plastered even the most hardened pilot against his seat. Punishing as the Titans of the 1960s were, however, there was one thing you could say for them: they got where they were going...
...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...
...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 similarly doomed a Delta...
...cyclical," says TIME science senior writer Jeffrey Kluger. "They tend to happen in clusters for no apparent reason." The pedigree of both rockets suggests that company engineers should be able to work out the kinks of these latest models reasonably quickly. "Both the Delta III and the Titan IV come from an extraordinary family of rockets," says Kluger. "Earlier versions of the Titan were used to lift up the Gemini astronauts, and the earlier Deltas had one of the most superlative launch records...