Paper Session I-B - Reliability, Recovery, and Reuse the Three R\u27s of a National Launch Strategy

The United States is approaching the 21st century with it\u27s space launch community providing only 1960 technology systems with unimpressive success records and with serious deficiencies in operational responsiveness and commercial viability. The current expendable systems have demonstrated launch success ratios of 0.85 to 0.95 with launch costs two to five times higher than the world class competition. The present U.S. Space Launch Infrastructure cannot support achievement of our National Space goals for Defense, Space Communication, SSF Logistics, and Exploration. Over the past 10 years, we have witnessed our share of the commercial satellites launched dwindle from 100% to less than 25%. We recovered from a series of major launch failures in the mid \u2780\u27s but have been plagued again in \u2791 and \u2792 with major launch system failures