Space companies feud over what to do with rockets in ICBM stockpile, Washington Post “Orbital ATK wants to unearth the dormant missiles and repurpose them to launch commercial satellites into orbit. Russia has released its Soviet-era ICBMs into the commercial market, the company argues, so the Pentagon should be allowed to sell its unused ICBMs as well. But to do that, Congress would have to ease a 20-year-old restriction that prohibits the sale of the missile motors for commercial use. And that has touched off a rancorous battle that has extended from the Pentagon to Capitol Hill, where Congress is scheduled to hold a hearing on the issue Tuesday.” Subcommittee Examines Commercial Satellite Industry, Policy Challenges, House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology “Those in favor of allowing excess ICBMs to be used for commercial launch services argue that many U.S. small satellites have launched on Russian DNEPR vehicles, derived from Russian ICBMs, and that by modifying existing U.S. policy, U.S. launch services could compete with Russia and bring this business back to America. Those in favor also argue that there is a cost to the taxpayer associated with storing excess ICBMs. By allowing the U.S. commercial launch industry to use excess ICBMs, you not only lower the tax burden, but also create potential revenue derived from the sale of these motors. However, those that oppose the policy change raise legitimate concerns that allowing excess ICBMs to be used for commercial launch purposes could distort the market in the United States, undermine future investment, and delay innovations that are on the horizon.”
– Subcommittee Discusses Small Satellites, House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Democrats
– Webcast
– Hearing Charter
– Hearing: Small Satellite Opportunities and Challenges
– Elliot Pulham, Space Foundation Testimony
– Eric Stallmer, Commercial Spaceflight Federation Testimony
– More Solid Rocket Food Fights, earlier post
– Why Not Use Old Missiles To Launch New Satellites?, earlier post
Stallmer @csf_spaceflight says "we do not want to see US satellites go overseas" & is against Indian LVs but Russia China Europe LVs are OK.
Not a rocket scientist here but I wonder if there is a price benefit of using ICBM hardware for satellite launchers? What mods? How difficult to make changes? Is it cheaper to begin with a rocket made for launching satellites (assuming have to buy it direct without govt subsidy) or modifying an ICBM simply easier procurement wise, i.e. don’t need to go through horrible bureaucracy on obtaining certain systems of small quantities produced. Or is it basically obtaining surplus military hardware for pennies on the dollar? I see lots of articles and lots of opinions, all claim to be authority on subject but have disagreements on who is correct.
Orbital ATK has argued that Russia has been converting their old Soviet ICBMs for commercial satellites, so we should too. That’s a fair argument, but maybe Russia’s notable lack of entrepreneurial commercial innovation in space launch is a direct result of this flood of Soviet ICBMs.
Sure, they’ve made good money with the Dnepr, Rokot and others, but I would argue that their future prospects have suffered.
How about someone takes all these 1000 ICBMs and just start shooting bulk useful mass to equatorial orbit. Something that doesn’t take anything very special to store on orbit indefinitely, like containers full of water. Or maybe metallic 3d printing powder. Consider it a downpayment for future orbital constructions or deep space mission needs.
Except it’s not good enough just to throw containers into LEO. Something has to collect them, keep them together, and keep them in orbit (remember Skylab’s uncontrolled reentry?). This costs money (potentially a lot of money) above and beyond simply putting containers in LEO.
I still believe the retired U.S. missiles should be put to productive non-commercial re-use, a bit more aggressively than they have been under the Minotaur program and in a way that still benefits companies like Orbital ATK.
The Air Force should determine their cost for maintaining and/or destroying the deactivated missiles and then solicit a vendor (like Orbital ATK) who can launch them for a smaller cost, one a month, until they’re all gone.
Each launch would support launch team training, missile defense targeting, and range technology testing. They can also carry non-commercial suborbital and orbital payloads for educational and government “customers”.
It creates a new market (launching as a means of disposing of the missiles) instead of encroaching on an existing market (launching commercial satellites). If there’s a concern about providing rides for educational and government satellites, maybe they could be limited to suborbital missions.
I’m not so sure about that. The “educational and government” satellites are a fairly large fraction of the current small satellite launch market. The new companies getting into this field may be counting on that for the first few years of their business plan. (I.e. until the existence of small, low-cost launch vehicles encourages the commercial market for them.)
One per month until they’re gone–with or without payloads–f it can be done at a cost roughly equal to the current cost of maintaining and destroying them.
By depressing the market for small LEO launches it could tale away a part of SpaceX’ market and actually raise the cost for launching larger GEO comsats. In the long run a healthy and competitive LV industry would be more valuable to the nation. If the storage costs are excessive they could simply be destroyed.
Exactly so and a good example of how important government policy can be, especially when fostering new technology. Letting these sad remnants be used to launch satellites would be as they say penny proud and pound foolish.
And in this case it’s not even picking sides, just in case Mr. Eagle is reading over my shoulder…
I’m always reading over your shoulder (giggles villainously and resumes stroking cranky-looking fancy white cat).
Must agree, though, that there’s no very obvious left-centric or right-centric rooting interest here.
I will say that, absent a new start-up player in smallsat launch which would compete with Orbital-ATK for these motors, I don’t favor changing the standing policy immediately. These missile motors have been in storage for two decades or thereabouts. I doubt that, say, five more years on warehouse shelving will prove decisively injurious to their future usability. Five years should be enough time for the emerging smallsat launch start-ups – Firefly, Rocket Lab, VG, etc. – to complete their development programs and succeed or fail in what will, by then, be either a vibrant and growing market or a collapsed balloon.
If it’s a collapsed balloon five years hence, the motors will have no value as launchers anyway and the question will be moot. Orbital-ATK won’t be clamoring for them and they can be knacked up and incinerated or whatever the most expedient means of destruction happens to be.
If, as I expect, the smallsat market is booming five years hence, then there may be more latitude to put some or all of these surplus motors on the market without seriously warping it in the process.
It would still be ideal to have at least one other entity of consequence for Orbital-ATK to bid against. Perhaps, having become, in the intervening half-decade, prosperous growing concerns, Rocket Lab, Firefly, VG – singly or in combination – would be in a position to do something more visionary with said motors than just compete with themselves launching smallsats.
It’s worth noting that all today’s nascent smallsat launch providers are going to field all-liquid-propellant vehicles. Liquid prop launchers give a much less rattly and distressing ride to orbit and at much lower G forces than would launchers that are still basically ICBM’s. It’s not obvious that smallsat makers would be terribly interested in beefing up their wares just to save what might be a fairly marginal amount on launch costs.
Savuporo and ellegood offer worthy suggestions that might well work even better in combination than either would separately. Bulk commodities, such as plastic and/or metal 3-D printer feedstocks, would mind neither the extra shaking nor the extra G-force attending an ICBM-style launch profile. There are – or at least were – two Minuteman and three MX silos at Vandenberg. The Minuteman silos are still used for periodic QA tests of actual missiles pulled from operational deployment silos. The MX silos, so far as I know, haven’t been used in more than a decade and would probably need some non-trivial rehabbing before re-use.
To keep the surplus motors mostly or entirely out of Orbital’s hands, the by-then-established smallsat launch companies could partner on a new entity designed to: 1) acquire and use up the surplus Minuteman and MX motors, 2) acquire rights to use the extant Minuteman and MX launch silos – and security-clearanced launch crews – at Vandenberg and, 3) provide a low-cost source of feedstocks for use by nascent orbital manufacturing enterprises. Such “rawmatsats” could even be auctioned, either before or after launch to orbit, if more than one such orbital manufacturing outfit is getting started by 2021 or so. Launch cadence would depend upon how quickly the test silos could be turned around between missions and how often actual test missiles needed to be fired.
The launch of such bulk cargo would likely not be an on-going business line for smallsat launchers – bulk cargo launching benefits pretty obviously from economies of scale – but it would be a way to keep the surplus missile motors out of the mainstream smallsat launch market and provide an early boost to orbital manufacturing as an industry.
The key policy here would be to do what De Beers diamonds did for a century, hold back ICBM’s and release for sale just so many every year ditto Platinum from asteroid mining if it were to ever produce large quantities. Bulk quantities with a large release of ICBM would be a orbital water depot…….
Are we talking, here, about selling these motors to domestic companies with appropriate security clearance, and launched from American soil? I believe there is still highly classified / sensitive technology involved in the mold geometry and exact material composition / specifications of the solid fuel in Minuteman III and Peacekeeper missiles.
Orbital ATK is the US company lobbying to buy and use these “surplus” motors. As far as I can tell, the ATK part of Orbital ATK made the first and third stages of Minuteman III and the first stage of the Peacekeeper.
NOT using the ICBM’s for peaceful launches…commercial or noncommercial —would be the greater transgression here . How many Minuteman missiles are lying about ? Weren’t we using the big Peacekeeper stages for the Minotaur IV for a while ? Seems like most of the commercial launchers are intended for heavier payloads anyway. The ICBM’s would be tailored for SmallSats and fleets of MinSats , or one offs. All I see is Win-Win.
First, ever see a warhead? It’s not very big, even when MIRV’d, which is why those rockets don’t have much throw ability.
Second, nothing happens in a vacuum, and as many have pointed out, dumping cheap rockets on a nascent industry is not very smart in the long term. We (the royal we, I suppose, as in we, the American citizenry) need a robust industry.
It actually looks like a robust rocket industry is what we are going to get- and one that is dominated by private companies. Who would have thought?
Lots of the success we are seeing is due to smart governmental policy and assistance (some of it just lucky stumbling, but still).
The problem is that only certain industry members(Orbital ATK) would benefit. Space X and ULA don’t have a lot of experience with the ICBM as ATK and Aeroject were the companies that build large solid rockets.
If you want to kill your nascent small sat’ industry, go right ahead and sell off these old ICBMs. You should notice just who’s pushing for these and think about the why? Cheers
In an ideal universe, all that space junk would get policed up by commercial enterprises looking to break it down and recycle the expensively launched materials for new uses on-orbit. But your suggestion is far from the worst conceivable outcome either. Barring some usage such as you suggest, I oppose putting these decommissioned ICBM motors on the market for at least another five years. The new launch companies that got organized under the existing rules deserve their chances to succeed and get established as going concerns under those rules before they are arbitrarily changed to benefit a single legacy player.
Not a rocket scientist here but I wonder if there is a price benefit of using ICBM hardware for satellite launchers? What mods? How difficult to make changes? Is it cheaper to begin with a rocket made for launching satellites (assuming have to buy it direct without govt subsidy) or modifying an ICBM simply easier procurement wise, i.e. don’t need to go through horrible bureaucracy on obtaining certain systems of small quantities produced. Or is it basically obtaining surplus military hardware for pennies on the dollar? I see lots of articles and lots of opinions, all claim to be authority on subject but have disagreements on who is correct.
Orbital ATK has argued that Russia has been converting their old Soviet ICBMs for commercial satellites, so we should too. That’s a fair argument, but maybe Russia’s notable lack of entrepreneurial commercial innovation in space launch is a direct result of this flood of Soviet ICBMs.
Sure, they’ve made good money with the Dnepr, Rokot and others, but I would argue that their future prospects have suffered.
I wonder how the Russian policy would change if, say, a Russian version of Mr. Musk to appear?
(Yes, I know, unlikely for a number of mostly governmentally-related reasons).
Here’s Russia’s Elon Musk… http://bit.ly/22Oq5zN
How about someone takes all these 1000 ICBMs and just start shooting bulk useful mass to equatorial orbit. Something that doesn’t take anything very special to store on orbit indefinitely, like containers full of water. Or maybe metallic 3d printing powder.
Consider it a downpayment for future orbital constructions or deep space mission needs.
Except it’s not good enough just to throw containers into LEO. Something has to collect them, keep them together, and keep them in orbit (remember Skylab’s uncontrolled reentry?). This costs money (potentially a lot of money) above and beyond simply putting containers in LEO.
High enough orbit, and they’ll stay there for hundreds of years. Enough time to figure out a solar-electric tug
Converted ICBMs can barely put something useful into LEO. I doubt they’d be able to put anything into an orbit that won’t decay for hundreds of years.
I still believe the retired U.S. missiles should be put to productive non-commercial re-use, a bit more aggressively than they have been under the Minotaur program and in a way that still benefits companies like Orbital ATK.
The Air Force should determine their cost for maintaining and/or destroying the deactivated missiles and then solicit a vendor (like Orbital ATK) who can launch them for a smaller cost, one a month, until they’re all gone.
Each launch would support launch team training, missile defense targeting, and range technology testing. They can also carry non-commercial suborbital and orbital payloads for educational and government “customers”.
How does this avoid depressing a very fragile nascent space launch industry?
It creates a new market (launching as a means of disposing of the missiles) instead of encroaching on an existing market (launching commercial satellites). If there’s a concern about providing rides for educational and government satellites, maybe they could be limited to suborbital missions.
I’m not so sure about that. The “educational and government” satellites are a fairly large fraction of the current small satellite launch market. The new companies getting into this field may be counting on that for the first few years of their business plan. (I.e. until the existence of small, low-cost launch vehicles encourages the commercial market for them.)
Don’t think I am following you. Just launch them, you say? Splash into the Atlantic/Pacific, or what?
One per month until they’re gone–with or without payloads–f it can be done at a cost roughly equal to the current cost of maintaining and destroying them.
By depressing the market for small LEO launches it could tale away a part of SpaceX’ market and actually raise the cost for launching larger GEO comsats. In the long run a healthy and competitive LV industry would be more valuable to the nation. If the storage costs are excessive they could simply be destroyed.
Exactly so and a good example of how important government policy can be, especially when fostering new technology. Letting these sad remnants be used to launch satellites would be as they say penny proud and pound foolish.
And in this case it’s not even picking sides, just in case Mr. Eagle is reading over my shoulder…
I’m always reading over your shoulder (giggles villainously and resumes stroking cranky-looking fancy white cat).
Must agree, though, that there’s no very obvious left-centric or right-centric rooting interest here.
I will say that, absent a new start-up player in smallsat launch which would compete with Orbital-ATK for these motors, I don’t favor changing the standing policy immediately. These missile motors have been in storage for two decades or thereabouts. I doubt that, say, five more years on warehouse shelving will prove decisively injurious to their future usability. Five years should be enough time for the emerging smallsat launch start-ups – Firefly, Rocket Lab, VG, etc. – to complete their development programs and succeed or fail in what will, by then, be either a vibrant and growing market or a collapsed balloon.
If it’s a collapsed balloon five years hence, the motors will have no value as launchers anyway and the question will be moot. Orbital-ATK won’t be clamoring for them and they can be knacked up and incinerated or whatever the most expedient means of destruction happens to be.
If, as I expect, the smallsat market is booming five years hence, then there may be more latitude to put some or all of these surplus motors on the market without seriously warping it in the process.
It would still be ideal to have at least one other entity of consequence for Orbital-ATK to bid against. Perhaps, having become, in the intervening half-decade, prosperous growing concerns, Rocket Lab, Firefly, VG – singly or in combination – would be in a position to do something more visionary with said motors than just compete with themselves launching smallsats.
It’s worth noting that all today’s nascent smallsat launch providers are going to field all-liquid-propellant vehicles. Liquid prop launchers give a much less rattly and distressing ride to orbit and at much lower G forces than would launchers that are still basically ICBM’s. It’s not obvious that smallsat makers would be terribly interested in beefing up their wares just to save what might be a fairly marginal amount on launch costs.
Savuporo and ellegood offer worthy suggestions that might well work even better in combination than either would separately. Bulk commodities, such as plastic and/or metal 3-D printer feedstocks, would mind neither the extra shaking nor the extra G-force attending an ICBM-style launch profile. There are – or at least were – two Minuteman and three MX silos at Vandenberg. The Minuteman silos are still used for periodic QA tests of actual missiles pulled from operational deployment silos. The MX silos, so far as I know, haven’t been used in more than a decade and would probably need some non-trivial rehabbing before re-use.
To keep the surplus motors mostly or entirely out of Orbital’s hands, the by-then-established smallsat launch companies could partner on a new entity designed to: 1) acquire and use up the surplus Minuteman and MX motors, 2) acquire rights to use the extant Minuteman and MX launch silos – and security-clearanced launch crews – at Vandenberg and, 3) provide a low-cost source of feedstocks for use by nascent orbital manufacturing enterprises. Such “rawmatsats” could even be auctioned, either before or after launch to orbit, if more than one such orbital manufacturing outfit is getting started by 2021 or so. Launch cadence would depend upon how quickly the test silos could be turned around between missions and how often actual test missiles needed to be fired.
The launch of such bulk cargo would likely not be an on-going business line for smallsat launchers – bulk cargo launching benefits pretty obviously from economies of scale – but it would be a way to keep the surplus missile motors out of the mainstream smallsat launch market and provide an early boost to orbital manufacturing as an industry.
The key policy here would be to do what De Beers diamonds did for a century, hold back ICBM’s and release for sale just so many every year ditto Platinum from asteroid mining if it were to ever produce large quantities.
Bulk quantities with a large release of ICBM would be a orbital water depot…….
Are we talking, here, about selling these motors to domestic companies with appropriate security clearance, and launched from American soil? I believe there is still highly classified / sensitive technology involved in the mold geometry and exact material composition / specifications of the solid fuel in Minuteman III and Peacekeeper missiles.
Orbital ATK is the US company lobbying to buy and use these “surplus” motors. As far as I can tell, the ATK part of Orbital ATK made the first and third stages of Minuteman III and the first stage of the Peacekeeper.
Orbital ATK is good at blowing up rockets (or failing to release the fairing…) so why not destroy some ICBMs?
NOT using the ICBM’s for peaceful launches…commercial or noncommercial —would be the greater transgression here . How many Minuteman missiles are lying about ? Weren’t we using the big Peacekeeper stages for the Minotaur IV for a while ? Seems like most of the commercial launchers are intended for heavier payloads anyway. The ICBM’s would be tailored for SmallSats and fleets of MinSats , or one offs. All I see is Win-Win.
First, ever see a warhead? It’s not very big, even when MIRV’d, which is why those rockets don’t have much throw ability.
Second, nothing happens in a vacuum, and as many have pointed out, dumping cheap rockets on a nascent industry is not very smart in the long term. We (the royal we, I suppose, as in we, the American citizenry) need a robust industry.
It actually looks like a robust rocket industry is what we are going to get- and one that is dominated by private companies. Who would have thought?
Lots of the success we are seeing is due to smart governmental policy and assistance (some of it just lucky stumbling, but still).
The problem is that only certain industry members(Orbital ATK) would benefit. Space X and ULA don’t have a lot of experience with the ICBM as ATK and Aeroject were the companies that build large solid rockets.
And probably have zero interest in solids, surely in the case of SpaceX.
What are the disposal costs vs. the rebuilding costs?
It’s government! Who cares what it costs!
If you want to kill your nascent small sat’ industry, go right ahead and sell off these old ICBMs. You should notice just who’s pushing for these and think about the why?
Cheers
In an ideal universe, all that space junk would get policed up by commercial enterprises looking to break it down and recycle the expensively launched materials for new uses on-orbit. But your suggestion is far from the worst conceivable outcome either. Barring some usage such as you suggest, I oppose putting these decommissioned ICBM motors on the market for at least another five years. The new launch companies that got organized under the existing rules deserve their chances to succeed and get established as going concerns under those rules before they are arbitrarily changed to benefit a single legacy player.