General Shelton says they’re not ready for prime time:
Launches of NASA cargo to the International Space Station, including one planned early Sunday, don’t guarantee SpaceX is ready to launch military satellites, the head of Air Force Space Command said Tuesday in Cape Canaveral.
If a rocket failed, the loss of a national security satellite potentially worth more than $1.5 billion would be a bigger setback than losing food, clothing and other station supplies, Gen. William Shelton told the National Space Club Florida Committee.
“So there’s a big difference,” he said.
This is one reason that talk about “human rating” an Atlas (or Delta) is silly. If it’s reliable enough for a $1.5B satellite, it’s reliable enough to carry crew. All it ever needed was failure onset detection. And when SpaceX starts flying crew, the general’s argument will be much less strong.
The General’s quote is only a statement about the desired/required reliability. It says nothing about the actual reliability of Falcon 9.
The relatively small number of missions flown by Falcon 9 doesn’t establish a sufficiently statistically validated reliability number. However, the implication that the Falcon 9 is deficient in some way is an unproven assertion, and in this context certainly undeserved hyperbole intended to favor an existing monoploy.
The article didn’t bother me. The headline says “Too soon to say SpaceX ready for military”, and the article says:
The Air Force has credited SpaceX for one of the three successful launches it must achieve to earn the opportunity to compete for a limited number of military launches in the coming years. Two more launches are under review.
So presumably once the Air Force completes its review of the SES-8 and Thaicom-6 launches, both of which were successful, they will be ready to certify SpaceX.
“So presumably once the Air Force completes its review of the SES-8 and Thaicom-6 launches, both of which were successful, they will be ready to certify SpaceX.”
For some (low priority) missions. Other missions will require many more successful flights and still others will require capability SpaceX does not yet have.
It took USAF five months to certify the Sept. 29 Falcon 9 v1.1 launch from Vandenberg AFB as one of three required mission successes under the EELV New Entrant Certification process. If SpaceX’s two subsequent GTO comsat missions take similar intervals to certify, then SpaceX should have three qualifying missions officially USAF-certified by June.
I am aware of no additional successful launch requirements, beyond three, needed for eligibility to launch National Security Satellites (NSS). I did find a year-old government document about a GAO review of the EELV New Entrant Certification Guide (NECG) mentioning that the criterion for successful missions had not yet been set, but might range from 2 to 14. It seems to have been set at three, though I can’t seem to locate a copy of the current NECG on-line to confirm this. Still, every story in the aerospace press for at least the past several months has mentioned three successful missions as being the minimum bar SpaceX, or any other potential new entrant, needs to get over in order to be certified for NSS payloads.
As for the three mission minimum only qualifying SpaceX for “low priority” missions, the USAF and NRO don’t seem to really have any. All, or nearly all, of their payloads seem to be considered what the previously cited document defines as Class A (most critical) birds. Class A payloads require a launch vehicle of the least risky type, which said document designates as Class 3.
My current understanding of the New Entrant Certification criteria is that any non-incumbent launch provider who meets them is, thereafter, cleared to bid for any future NSS launch missions, including Class A birds. If you can cite any sources that say otherwise, I’d be grateful to have them pointed out.
I guess Elon failed to offer him the position of Vice President in Charge of Schmoozing My Old Buddies Still in Uniform when he retires.
Back in the 1985-86 timeframe when we had a terrible string of launch failures (Titan-34, Challenger, Delta II, Atlas, and another Titan-34 – the only booster we had left was the Scout), I joked that we needed a launch escape system for payloads. Given the insanely high costs of new satellites like SBIRS and AEHF, perhaps it’s time to take my joke seriously.
Remember the first Delta IV Heavy launch? Fail. Second launch? Fail. Client? USAF.
It is quite a common event for the first flights of new launch systems to fail. It does not mean the system will be unsafe in the long run.
I guess if the rocket has the name ‘Boeing’ attached then mission history stops being important for the USAF.
“Remember the first Delta IV Heavy launch? Fail. Second launch? Fail. Client? USAF.”
Both of those launches were successful, as were all other Delta IVs. You may be thinking of the Delta III. The first two launches of that one did fail.
EELV has enough flights that there is some reasonable statistical base of confidence.
Many EELV components also have flight heritage going back to the 60’s.
The real sad point is that the EELV could have been man-rated decades ago and
used instead of the shuttle.
How does a satellite come to cost a billion and a half dollars? What would it cost extra to make two of them in case the first launch fails?
High reliability, long endurance, and specialized sensors make military and intelligence sats expensive. And that’s the likely cost for a system that already has multiples being built. They tried going the small, cheap route and they had to cancel the program (Google Future Imagery Architecture).