International Launch Services is hoping that it can reduce the insurance premium paid for its launches as compared to rival Arianespace with a series of launch successes over the summer.
ILS president Phil Slack, speaking a press briefing in Washington,…
International Launch Services is hoping that it can reduce the insurance premium paid for its launches as compared to rival Arianespace with a series of launch successes over the summer.
ILS president Phil Slack, speaking a press briefing in Washington, admitted that the Proton currently garnered a higher rate than the Ariane 5 but believed that this differential would come down with the successful completion of the company’s busy launch manifest over the next few months.
Slack said: “Rates are certainly higher than they were prior to the failure. This time a year ago we were probably within a quarter point, half a point of Arianespace. If you were trying to insure something today we would certainly be higher, by a couple of points.
“Typically, if you have a failure it may take three of four launches for rates to come down. It may take a little bit longer this time but the good news is that we have a string of missions set up that will occur in a fairly short period. Through August we expect there will be a total of seven missions including one federal. So we hope that if we have a good string of successes there then that should bring rates down within a tolerable range. We’re certainly not going to be right back where Arianespace is, 54 successes in a row, but we should get back down into a reasonable range.”
ILS enjoyed a successful return to flight on 27 March with the launch of Satmex-8 and is now preparing to launch Telesat’s Anik-G1 satellite on 16 April.
Breeze-M reliability study to assuage insurer concerns
Unlike previous anomalies, the failure of the Proton rocket carrying Gazprom Space Systems’ Yamal-402 was not a workmanship issue, it was an engine tolerance issue and a question of acceptable margins.
Given that the same configurations and operating conditions had been flown successfully 66 times, some insurers have expressed concerns over the lack of predictability in the engine tolerance issue and whether this might be a problem for other aspects of the Breeze-M.
Addressing this, John Palmé CTO of ILS said, “You are absolutely correct, insurers are asking that question. In this case, they (Khrunichev) had conditions for the inlet of the oxidiser requirement that they thought they had adequately bounded with margin. But in the case of the Yamal-402 anomaly it was on the wrong side of the vapour transition line. So because of that stack up, it went over that line and they did not have the margin that they needed to.
“This Breeze-M reliability study is to go back through that and ask ‘where is the design margin in the system and is that margin adequate or does additional margin need to be added?’
“Now obviously we have taken care of this specific anomaly that was experienced on Yamal-402 but we need to go back and go through all the systems again.”
Khrunichev expects to take around a year to complete the Breeze-M reliability improvement study, which will go through the engine subsystem by subsystem basis, identifying any areas of concern or weak areas that could be improved.
For its part, ILS is pushing its parent to bring in outside expertise. Palmé said, “We do want them (Khrunichev) to bring in independent organisations throughout the Russian aerospace enterprise to help provide some independent fresh eyes on the design margins and the manufacturing reliability.”
