From reading the NASA historian interview with Orbital's Antares managers, I understand Orbital's payloads often went on Delta IIs, yet they knew the vehicle is going away soon. They were studying Taurus II as a replacement but never could really close the business case for building it. Then CRS presented an opportunity to cover the development costs and so they finally went for it. I don't think there was/is any plan to compete with ULA, rather to fill the void left by Delta II and be able to offer a complete package for the payloads they build including launch. Now that ATK is in the picture, plans may have changed though.
Accurate.
Obviously if it's no longer cool to launch DoD birds on RD-180 powered vehicle, neither it's on RD-181 powered Antares. Developing a radically new booster may not make sense for the same reason building Taurus II didn't - if the money doesn't come from outside. And considering the only such source would be CRS-2, for which the proposals were already submitted and for all we know will no longer include development support and even if it did it would likely be too late anyway. I think they either fly liquid or don't fly at all.
And the reason for RD-181 is ... the smallest investment to return Antares to flight. Which may continue to be held hostage in various ways to the obvious.
And the liquid can only come from Yuzmash. Now that Yuzmash's tooling is no longer serving other needs, perhaps they could buy it off of Ukraine and establish production somewhere less turbulent?
It's not just the tooling, its the full industry base and it's highly skilled labor/experience that's hard to get elsewhere at the same cost, like with Russia, absent the very obvious contest of powers underway. In these, among the first victims are commerce, truth and transparency.
Not to show geo/political ignorance, but are not the tanks produced in Dnipropetrovsk? Which is inside the eastern Ukraine area of conflict?
It is well within the Kiev controlled zone currently. But of more importance is the possibility of the Ukrainian company shutting itself down, as it is reportedly on the verge of bankruptcy, etc. Yuzhmash is reportedly shut down right now, its workers, who say they haven't been paid since June, sent home until March at least. (Of course these reports could be propaganda, since you would expect a company like this to be producing arms for Kiev right now.)
- Ed Kyle
And is interdependent on Russian interests (industrial, finance, other) to operate. Companies aren't assembled like LEGOs either ...
Holding Ukraine in the Russian economic influence appears to be what this conflict is all about. And that is why Antares is at risk and will continue to be.
Wallops is not a good location for those orbits, and Jim has said before that USG won't launch their payloads on an LV that's not launching out of CCAFS for East Coast launches. It also sounds like the pad at Wallops would not be easily modified for vertical payload integration which USG would require.
Technically these are DoD requirements. NASA isn't quite as picky, hence the LADEE mission from Wallops about a year and a half ago.
Absolutely. And the choice of WFF/MARS was more under the theory of bootstrapping a low capital outlay Delta II replacement (many other choices to this as well), that could in the long term provide independence from providers in putting in house sats in orbit.
All American launches are about coupling sat programs to launch services, now even SpaceX is doing that as well.
The odd one here is ULA, in that it supplies the two biggest and longest (Boeing and Lockheed) sat suppliers with a higher end, higher cost, higher reliability means to fly those birds.
They all work/compete the same way. You want to streamline all elements of the mission from concept to on orbit operation. In the case of launch services, not to have a sat sitting on the ground gathering dust because someone else gets your slot for launch. You want to be paid for on orbit so that you can offer/accept new as soon as possible.
I have seen far worse business models than focus on what you do best. I just wonder if OrgATK's goal is to maintain market share or to expand? Is Antares envisioned as a stepping stone for long term gains with a true planned programmatic expansion and development or just designed and reacting to meet current demand?
Orbital hedged/hedges its bets with ULA and SpaceX launch services. The point of Antares is independence.
What this means is it does not need to be a "frequent flyer", but a "gap filler".
Perhaps a small cache of RD-181's and Ukrainian assembled stages is a "good enough" strategy to fill enough gaps for the interim, and you do your volume of launches through SpaceX/ULA? Sounds good enough to me.
As to ATK solids - here's the problem in a nutshell. Orbital did Antares amazingly cost effectively, using every cost leveraging trick in the book.
They had to! Wall Street would hurt them otherwise! And .. even with set backs (MARS), they made the thing work a few times. But that luck ran out.
Now, tell me any solid strategy that fits the same "use of capital" strategy. The big solids are right out, because they run counter to rational capital structures from the start, because they were/are done under government fiat (e.g. done for a "soft power" reason not a capital use reason). Everything about them drives up launch costs, costs that will never be recovered under any reasonable expectation of use, especially bad as a "gap filler".
So we're left with Ed Kyle's adequate 2x stacked solids, or my poor performance, absurd "liquid solid solid", which
attempted to reuse much of Antares marginal industry base . Even in these reduced cases, the business case comes no where near closing.
Perhaps, if SLS were flying, OrbATK could find a way of leveraging the solids, but no way would that please Wall Street, in the same way that PWR RS68 and SSME kind of propped things up like two playing cards pushed together, until one fell.
And this is why things are the way they are. You may now return to the regularly scheduled fantasy LV discussions.
edit:typos galore