Thirteen years ago, I held my breath as a 200-foot-tall rocket roared to life and lifted off the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Fla. I was several miles away, surrounded by television cameras and reporters. My brilliant quote — “Whoo hoo” — was picked up by the wire services and reported around the country.
The sentiment was heartfelt: As chief systems engineer, my job was to make sure all the pieces and parts of the 20-story machine worked as intended to send the communications satellite to its destination 20,000 miles above the Earth. I was terrified that some tiny detail was missed.
In total, the launch was the achievement of a team of 1,000 engineers and technicians. And it was designed and built in Colorado.
My rocket, the Atlas V, recently completed its 53rd successful mission and has launched spacecraft to a range of destinations from low Earth orbit to Pluto. The Pluto mission, NASA’s New Horizons, will make its closest approach to Pluto this summer (July 14, mark your calendars!) after a nine-year journey covering 3 billion miles.
The Atlas V has been a workhorse for national security, launching satellites for the Global Positioning System, military communications, missile warning, and intelligence gathering.
For a rocket scientist, developing a new large rocket is about as good as it gets. The process is arduous. There is the upfront, creative phase where the design is formulated and analyzed. Then comes development testing, a series of science experiments to demonstrate that the various design elements work. Then you need a factory to build the design. That step involves more design of machines and tools for the factory. And you have to design and build the launch pad, control center and assembly buildings. Finally, you have to prove that each and every bit will work together. Atlas V took four years and cost more than $2 billion.
Yet the rewards are priceless.
My career has been blessed with a number of such development opportunities, the Atlas V experience being the high point so far. Next up: In 2018, the Atlas V will fly humans for the first time when NASA astronauts travel to the International Space Station.
And our team at United Launch Alliance is starting the development of a new rocket, with even more power and capability than the Atlas V or the Delta IV, the other rocket in our fleet. This new rocket will be unveiled April 13 at the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. It will fly in 2019.
The Space Symposium is a uniquely Colorado event. Held at the venerable Broadmoor, the Space Symposium attracts several thousand leaders and enthusiasts in commercial, civil and military space from around the world.
It is a symbol of the importance of space to Colorado’s economy. Colorado has the highest per capita number of aerospace workers in the nation, with nearly 170,000 total jobs and more than $3 billion in annual payroll.
On Monday, we’ll also reveal a new name for the rocket. For the past several weeks, the public has been able to vote for one of five names: Eagle, Freedom, GalaxyOne, Vulcan or Zeus.
If you voted for the winner, you too will have something personal at stake when it soars into the sky for the first time. Maybe you’ll yell “Whoo Hoo!” too.
George Sowers of Morrison is a rocket scientist with the United Launch Alliance and a member of the 2015 Colorado Voices panel.
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