A Titan 4A rocket blew up Wednesday morning over Cape Canaveral, Fla., in the most expensive space disaster in years. The nation lost about $1.3 billion in space equipment, including a spy satellite that had been expected to greatly improve eavesdropping on phone and other communications around the world.
Investigators of the accident will begin by focusing on the Titan’s solid rocket boosters because the explosion occurred early in flight, said a senior Air Force rocket official.
He said the last two Titan explosions, in 1993 and 1986 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, were traced to failures in the casings of the solid rocket boosters, made by United Technologies in San Jose, Calif.
United Technologies said there were no early signs of trouble with the boosters in Wednesday’s launch.
“The indications we had is that they were functioning properly at the time,” said Frank Verlot, a company spokesman.
The rocket started to self-destruct at 7:30 a.m. EDT, 40 seconds after the launch. Two seconds later, flight controllers blew up the rest of the rocket to prevent a larger accident, and the orange toxic plumes drifted out over the Atlantic Ocean. No one was hurt.
The accident fueled debate about whether the government is spending too much money on high-tech, eye-in-the-sky gadgetry instead of a network of old-fashioned undercover spies. The satellite was not insured.
The top-secret spy satellite belonged to the National Reconnaissance Office, one of the country’s 13 intelligence agencies. Wednesday’s launch of the satellite had been planned four years ago, according to a knowledgeable government official.
“It’s a serious loss,” said the official. “It’s not like we have an assembly line out there with satellites ready to go.”
“It’s a serious setback,” added Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
“There are going to be consequences as a result. It’s a very, very serious challenge to the (intelligence) community.”
While government officials refused to reveal the satellite’s mission, John Pike, space policy director for the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington think tank, said it was likely it would have replaced an aging eavesdropping satellite. The U.S. has 10 satellites that intercept telephone, radio and other broadcast communications in the Middle East and Asia, he said.
“It’s $1 billion worth of satellite,” Pike said, adding that intelligence agencies will have to make up for the loss by spreading existing satellites farther apart.
The cost underscores the concern in U.S. intelligence circles about the government’s reliance on technology to spy.
The United States spends $26 billion a year to gather intelligence, according to Duncan Levin, a spokesman for the Center for National Security Studies.
Most of that money is believed to have been spent on high-tech surveillance, such as satellites that can listen to phone conversations, detect troop movements at night and photograph areas as small as 25 feet wide.
But those same gadgets have missed important developments, such as the preparations for nuclear tests in India and Pakistan and last week’s bombings in East Africa.
The Titan rocket program, which dates to the 1960s, has a 5 percent failure rate, said Evan McCollum, spokesman for rocket-maker Lockheed Martin Corp.
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