It was one of the most awe-inspiring rocket launches in recent memory. On January 20, a Delta IV Heavy rocket as tall as a 23-story building blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, apparently carrying a multi-billion-dollar, school bus-size Keyhole spy satellite that took at least five years to fund and build. The noise and vibration from the 1.6-million-pound rocket were so tremendous, that the Air Force had to tell local residents it wasn’t an earthquake.

Dramatic, yes. But there was something wrong with the picture. “Ponderous,” is how Gen. C. Robert Kehler, former Air Force Space Command boss, described old-school sats last year, as reported by National Defense.

Compare the January launch to the one scheduled for today. If everything goes as planned, the military will finally get the small, fast, cheap satellite of its dreams … sometime between 8:00 and 11:00 PM EST, weather permitting.

That’s when the first Operationally Responsive Space mission, codenamed “ORS-1,” is slated to blast off on an 80,000-pound Minotaur rocket (pictured) from Wallops Island, Virginia. The payload is a Senior Year camera, built by Goodrich and based on the model fitted to the U-2 spy plane. Its destination: 250 miles above the earth, in an orbit optimized for Afghanistan. Time from contract to launch: just 30 months. Cost: no more than $100 million.

For the better part of a decade, the consumer electronics business has been in the middle of a “Good Enough” revolution, where simple and cheap often beats complex and expensive and feature-rich. Now, the Air Force is finally getting on board.

For years, the Air Force has been trying to make spacecraft smaller, simpler and cheaper, build more of them and shrink the time for purchase, construction and launch. In short, to make spy sats as “operationally responsive” as drones and manned spy planes — even if that means some individual satellites are somewhat less than cutting-edge.

The new, small satellite doesn’t just share a camera with the U-2. “The very same computer software system that is used to task airborne … assets, airborne imagery systems, they will use those exact same assets to task this spacecraft,” said Peter Wegner, head of the ORS office, tells Aviation Week. That’s another way the Pentagon is trying to shrink, simplify and speed up its spacecraft.

The drive (.pdf) for faster, cheaper sats began around the same time China started testingsatellite-killing rockets. That was no coincidence. One goal of responsive space is to “help us counter threats to our space capabilities,” Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn said. “By building systems on small satellites, using modular components, ORS gives us the ability to rapidly augment our space systems.”

In other words, if China shoots down a satellite, the Pentagon can quickly loft a replacement — or two or three.

Technologically, it’s not necessarily hard to make satellites smaller, cheaper and more responsive. The problem is managerial. “Something is wrong with the process,” Kehler said.

The Pentagon officials overseeing space programs aren’t used to accepting anything less than the most sophisticated, complex and expensive solutions to a given problem. “Very rarely do we say, ‘Well gee, this one looks like 60 percent of what we did before, so we’ll just use the 60 percent,’” Raytheon official Tom McDonald told National Defense.

Besides having fewer capabilities than old-fashioned sats, responsive spacecraft also don’t last as long — just a few years, compared to a decade or more for Keyholes and other big satellites. “If you’re willing to accept short mission lives, and you are a little less risk averse, then you can do things quicker and cheaper,” said Goodrich’s Charles Cox.

The (hopefully) successful launch of the first responsive satellite should go a long way to building confidence in this new approach to orbital spying. It also helps that the Air Force’s first space plane is itself essentially a small, cheap, nimble and reusable satellite — and that small spacecraft could prove a popular export for the U.S. space industry.

After all, most nations don’t even have the option of investing more than five years and a billion dollars in a single satellite.

Photo: Air Force

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