Washington, DC – Jan 3, 1998 – With the dawning of the new year, major new space projects that have been years – and in some cases decades – in the making are poised for initiation, with important new expendable and reusable launch vehicles ready for their debut. The International Space Station, and the NASA Mission To Planet Earth projects will also get their start in 1998.
Just days into 1998, the long delayed Lunar Prospector satellite is to fly
from Launch Complex 46 at Cape Canaveral Air Station. The Prospector,
targeted for searching the Moon’s poles for possible trapped water ice (as
indicated by the BMDO Clementine 1 probe in 1994), will ride atop a
Lockheed Martin Athena 2 rocket. The booster, originally named the LMLV-2,
will be making its maiden flight on the launch.(see Lunar Prospector to Search for Water
Early in the spring, Boeing will launch their first Delta III expendable
booster, the first new Delta launch vehicle in nearly a decade. The Delta
III doubles the payload margin to geostationary orbit of the Delta II variants, and will allow Boeing to compete against the Atlas IIAR series as well as Ariane 4 versions still to be flying for the next half decade.
A Hughes’ HS601 will be the inaugural payload – fitting, since Hughes was critical in providing Boeing (then McDonnell Douglas) with enough launch contracts to move the project into development in 1994.
Spring will also see the third test flight of the Ariane 5 booster, the
first launch under the active control of the commercial launch firm
Arianespace. Ariane 503 will also carry commercial space payloads into
orbit. By fall, a fourth Ariane 5 is also scheduled for launch as a fully commercial operation.
Spring will also see the lift-off of the first A.M. platform in the Mission
To Planet Earth program. An Atlas IIAS rocket will lift-off from Vandenberg
Air Force Base in California with the first of three major science
satellites, that will study major climatic changes in the Earth’s weather
system.
Then in July (on current schedules, which may slip a few weeks or months) is the first launch of a large expendable rocket from a floating platform. Boeing’s “Sea Launch” Zenit 3 rocket is to carry its first commercial satellite to geostationary orbit from a site parked in the mid-Pacific Ocean near American Samoa. The rocket’s first customer? A Hughes satellite, of course.
Summer 1998 should see assembly commence on the International Space Station A Russian Proton rocket will carry the FGB building block into space in June from Baikonur Cosmodrome. Just weeks later, the Space Shuttle will fly up to the unit, and attach the first structure in a sequence that will take NASA and its space partners over four years to complete.
By fall, two major reusable launch vehicles under development by the
U.S. are set for major milestones. The X-33 is to roll out from its
Skunkworks assembly plant in Palmdale, California in late October. and the
following month is to see the roll out of the X-34 reusable technology test
bed winged spacecraft from its assembly site in Dulles, Virginia. The X-34
is to begin flight testing in late 1998 with captive taxi tests with its
L-1011 carrier aircraft. The first airborne test flight of the attached
vehicle may occur in late 1998 as well.
And 1998 is to end with the first launch from completely renovated pads in
Florida, of the Atlas IIAR. The new Atlas, the first in a decade, will mark
the first U.S. launch vehicle to use Russian-made rocket engines. It will
also mark the first Atlas design that will look markedly different to John Glenn’s 1962 Atlas lineage, and more like a standard space booster for the
early 21st century. The rocket will use a common core that will one day fly as part of the post-Titan IVB class of Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles for the U.S. Air Force.
With the space station, Mission to Earth, new Atlas and Delta rockets, a new
sea-going launch pad, the first private spaceship tests, and the completion of the first X rocketplanes in decades, 1998 is going to the year commercial space came of age, and SpaceCast will be here to bring you daily news from this new frontier.
