Test Team Betting "Evolved" Launch-Vehicle Concept Can Save Taxpayers $10 Billion

NASA STENNIS SPACE CENTER, Miss. -- "A rocket engine is a terrible thing to waste," says Steve Goo, a real-life rocket scientist for The Boeing Company.

"Unfortunately, most of the launch-vehicle components launched by this country end up at the bottom of the sea," he says. "We've been feeding the fish about a billion dollars' worth of engines every year. We need to change the way we're doing business."

According to Goo and his team of engineers, U.S. taxpayers could save about $10 billion over the next decade if the U.S. Air Force could recover and reuse launch-vehicle engines instead of letting them fall into the drink. To prove their point, the Boeing launch team is getting ready to parachute one of NASA's most relied-upon launch-vehicle engines -- a Space Shuttle Main Engine -- to a water landing in the Gulf of Mexico.

"We've been working on this technology for a dozen years," says Goo, chief engineer for the Boeing Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program. "The hundreds of hours of laboratory and wind tunnel testing are behind us. The computer simulations are over. At this point, it is quite literally sink or swim."

Boeing is one of four contractors competing to build the next generation of space launchers for the U.S. Air Force. But what it is proposing is dramatically different. Rather than attempting to build launch vehicles cheaply and continue to throw them away after each use, Boeing is proposing to build a high-quality rocket and recover all the costliest parts -- engines, turbo machinery, hydraulic flight controllers and other propulsion-related gear -- and use this equipment over and over again.

"Whoever heard of throwing away an engine after 20 miles?" asks test director Don Graves. "But that is exactly what the U.S. has been doing all these years in the rocket launching business. What this team is about is changing all that."

The Boeing EELV concept is simple: put all the most expensive parts of the launch vehicle into a water-tight module, and parachute it back to Earth for a water landing like the early NASA space capsules.

To do this, Boeing has designed a launch vehicle that includes a sea-worthy propulsion module. The module will contain two Space Shuttle Main Engines and all the intricate flight hardware it takes to operate them; it also contains a trio of parachutes to float the entire package gently back to earth, and a self-inflating spray shield to entirely enclose and protect the engines -- keeping them bone dry at all times.

The concept is simple, but making it all work is not. This is, after all, rocket science.

"We've invested a dozen years of research and development in this concept," Goo says. "We've done wind-tunnel tests, wave-tank tests -- you name it. We're convinced that this concept can save billions of dollars over the next 10 to 20 years -- more than any other approach. And we're ready to prove it."

To do so, Boeing built a prototype of its propulsion module and has been subjecting it to unforgiving conditions in the hot, humid lowlands of NASA's John C. Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

The module, which includes an actual Space Shuttle Main Engine, has successfully been flown around by helicopter, dropped repeatedly into canals from the end of a crane, and even flung from a moving helicopter into the Mississippi waterways in simulation of difficult cross-wind water-landing conditions.

"The test team has done an outstanding job," says program manager Tim White, "and all the data indicate that this design will do everything we've said it will, and then some.

"When you think of all the payloads that the Air Force must launch over the next 20 or so years -- and then realize that we're on to a new way of doing business that could cut those costs in half -- it's very exciting," White says.

While the Boeing design -- and the company's eventual proposal to the Air Force -- are coming together nicely, the test team isn't done torturing the prototype launch-vehicle module yet. Not by a long shot.

Later this month the team intends to -- literally -- make a big splash with its recoverable module when it drops the 20,000-pound piece of space hardware 4,000 feet from a Boeing-built Chinook helicopter into the Gulf of Mexico. Parachutes, spray shield, engine and the module itself will face all the challenges of recovery from an actual launch.

"We'll get to see what this really looks like in operation," Goo says. "Simulations and engineering analyses can only tell you so much, but hardware never lies."

The Boeing EELV test and demonstration program continues throughout the summer. Boeing and its competitors will submit their proposals to the Air Force in September.