Lockheed, driven to look for another motor supplier, lost any chance of having its booster ready in time to satisfy President Bush's 2004 deployment date. Meeting that deadline would depend on Orbital, the other booster supplier.
Founded in 1982 by three friends not long out of Harvard Business School, Orbital had concentrated on research and development, not soon-to-be-deployed weapons systems. With several hundred million dollars in annual revenue, the company was still a bit player in an industry characterized by a few big-name firms that earned over $20 billion a year.
Orbital seized on the booster project as a ticket to the major leagues -- and also a way out of debt. Like almost all U.S. satellite builders and rocket companies in the 1990s, Orbital had gone deeply into debt investing in commercial satellite networks.
Pentagon officials decided to take a chance with the small, financially burdened firm because of its record of solid performance. They also liked the fact that its design would be based on the company's Pegasus rocket, which had failed just three times in 31 launches of small satellites.
"Was there concern going with a smaller company? A little bit, but not overwhelming," recalled Maj. Gen. John Holly, manager of what the MDA calls the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system. "They were not as big as Lockheed but they had a proven track record."
In early 2002, the company was given one year to produce a prototype booster for a test launch. The launch, which took place 13 months later, was a success.
"I think that really broke the ice," said J.R. Thompson, Orbital's president. "We changed from being a stalking horse to being a real contender to provide the booster."
But converting Pegasus into a missile defense booster wasn't simple. Pegasus is launched from underneath an airplane and has wings and control fins to help it fly. Orbital had to strip off the wings and fins and figure out how to shoot it from a silo.
"There were two ways missiles got out of silos in the U.S. missile experience," said David W. Thompson, one of Orbital's founders and currently its chief executive. One was by using the rocket's own thrust. The other was by injecting a compressed gas into the system before igniting the rocket engines.
"We couldn't do either one of those," he said. "Instead, we needed a system that could actively steer the vehicle as it flew out of the silo, and the tolerances were pretty tight. We described it as taking the Enterprise out of space dock at warp power, so you had to be pretty careful about how you did that."
The missile defense mission presented Orbital with additional challenges. The guidance and navigation components were complex. So was the software used to link the interceptor to the system's command and control network.
Further, space launches normally allowed plenty of time to get ready. With Pegasus, for instance, the countdown tended to span a couple of days. But with missile defense, the booster would need to blast off within minutes. That meant a design that could allow for both long-term storage in a silo and short-notice activation.
"I think we went into it with our eyes pretty wide open and had made a pretty realistic assessment of the technical challenges in front of us," said Ronald J. Grabe, a former astronaut who runs Orbital's launch vehicles business unit.
One approach Orbital considered but rejected was canisterizing the booster as the original Boeing -- now Lockheed -- design had done. While the canister made it easier to move the booster, it also complicated maintenance. Doing without a canister, Grabe said, "seemed to us to be a little more straightforward."
The initial demonstration launch in February 2003 marked the first time Orbital had included a steering nozzle on the first stage of its Pegasus rocket. The launch also achieved successful separation of the first and second stages.
"With that flight, we addressed about 60 to 70 percent of what we thought were the high-risk items," David Thompson said.
A second launch in August 2003 demonstrated many remaining items. And a third launch in January this year was the first to fly with the full deployment configuration, using a mock kill vehicle. By then, Pentagon officials were talking to Orbital about speeding up production.
Originally, the Pentagon had planned to use a mix of Orbital and Lockheed boosters in the initial deployment of 16 interceptors at Fort Greely in Alaska and four at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California through 2005. With Lockheed sidelined until 2006, Orbital has expanded production to meet the full demand for boosters in this first batch.
The booster project has become Orbital's single biggest program, representing just under 30 percent of company's total revenue last year and employing 25 percent of its workforce.
But the Orbital booster has yet to be flight-tested with an actual kill vehicle. The first such test, due months ago, has been postponed repeatedly as a result of technical issues with the booster as well as with the kill vehicle, which is made by Raytheon Co.
