Congratulations to Firefly Aerospace, which has fulfilled the responsive space test of a 24-hour launch-on-notice of the VICTUS NOX mission. To be honest, I wasn't sure the company was mature enough to do it yet but I’m glad to see that they are. While the company takes its much-deserved victory lap, one question remains: “Why did it take so long to demonstrate responsive launch?”
The idea that highly responsive launch was not possible or practical was embedded in the Air Force and Air Force Space Command for several decades. Of course, it was legitimate to discuss the need for rapid lunch, but the idea it wasn't workable was more because it didn't fit in with the belief system than it was about technology. We've always been able to do responsive spot their effort. When the US built its first large missiles, starting with the Redstone in the early 1950s, they were designed to be responsive. Experience during that decade narrowed the time needed to launch a missile further and further until it got into the classified times of modern ICBMs.
So the technology was always there. What was missing was the will to accomplish it, the money to accomplish it, and the overhead and regulations that built up over time. In 1997, Air Force Space Command, Directorate of Requirements, Missiles (AFSPC/DRM, for ICBM Requirements) commissioned the Tactical Launch Study in response to a proposal by your own beloved historian. This was the first study to examine all aspects of responsive space units, from top-level requirements and directives to a very thorough cost evaluation. It got nowhere.
Granted, the infrastructure, both physical and command and control, was not in place for this sort of activity, because the USAF had never supported such activity and developed such infrastructure. It was wedded to enormous high-capacity satellites that has to be launched on schedule. It would be many years (and many technical improvements) before the US military accepted that small satellites, which could derive useful advantages from rapid paunch, were important. The study did describe how that might be short circuited using modified procedures and revised command and control to adapt specifically for those launches, but no one was interested in paying for it. There were several stabs before and after that report at actually creating responsive launch. Space historian Dwayne Day in particular has done has documented a large number of programs generally forgotten by the public, including launch for a B-52 and an F-106 Delta Dart [publication pending]. Programs that did exist included the Navy's Project Pilot (audacious but a technical failure) and the Air Force’s Blue Scout (axed for lack of perceived
requirement and a middling record before it really set to work on shortening its launch times).
Several programs in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s were proposed or attempted, including an Army plan to launch boosters off mobile systems in Europe to provide tactical support and the Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) office. All such efforts to speed up the launch process all came to naught, in part simply because of the existing paradigm. The 2003-4 DARPA Falcon program (not related to the SpaceX Falcon rockets) came to grief the same way as did the AirLaunch QuickReach project, which got only as far as dropping an inert rocket from a C-17 cargo plane in 2006. Some potential answers, like the Air Force’s Super Strypi-based SPARK and DARPA's ALASA program, failed in their first efforts and were abandoned.
Satellites which began as small multi-kilogram craft in the 1950s had evolved by the 1970s into increasingly costly and complex multi-ton satellites. Launch risk had to be driven down as far as possible, a very successful effort but one which required the aforementioned long, complex launch-on-schedule process. With the military wholly dependent on such large satellites with perhaps eight launches in a given year, small launch was either not done at all or carried out on a contracted basis without a responsive timeline. The air-launched Pegasus was originally supposed to be capable of a very short timeline (indeed, this is a main justification of air launch - no need for traditional ranges and their timelines), but DoD never paid to demonstrate this.
The Firefly launch has ended any debate about whether a 24-hour timeline was technically feasible and about whether infrastructure and command and control could support a timeline of that sort. The next question for the USSF, then, is “Where do we go from here?” Will the Service continue with this type of one-at-a-time contracted launches, or consider the Guardian Scout model from your author and his colleagues, who proposed a permanent unit with active-duty officers rotating through to get experience in launch as well as provide the capability? The answer is not yet final.
This is a case where we do NOT want to repeat history. Past efforts at responsive launch have been one-offs, short-lived programs, or subject to cancellation to pay other bills or as a response to perceived lack of need. Now? As a history buff, I conjecture what Benjamin Franklin might say in response to the question, “What have we created?“ “A responsive launch capability, if you can keep it.”
Guardian Scout: Military Space from the Pad Up | AIAA SciTech Forum
AirLaunch To Learn Fate of QuickReach in December - SpaceNews
www.mattbilleauthor.com
Matt is the author of The First Space Race: Launching the World's First Satellites (TAMU, 2004)
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