Synopsis
CENTAUR G-PRIME TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION: A HIGH-PERFORMANCE UPPER STAGE FOR THE NASA SPACE TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMThe well-known and powerful Centaur upper stage, used with the Atlas and Titan boosters for decades, was a natural choice for an upper stage for the Space Shuttle. A new version of the Centaur, Shuttle-Centaur (aka STS-Centaur), was built by General Dynamics/Convair. The first Shuttle-Centaur stage and its payload (the Galileo mission to Jupiter) were being prepared for flight at Kennedy Space Center on the day of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. A suddenly more risk-averse NASA cancelled the Shuttle-Centaur program shortly thereafter.Two versions of the Shuttle-Centaur were to have been made: one for the military (G), one for NASA (G-prime). This report, prepared for NASA by the Convair Division of General Dynamics, provides a wealth of details about the structure, operation and processing of Shuttle-Centaur in general, and of G-Prime in particular.This report was originally published in 1984 as a spiral bound manual. This Expanded Edition (2014) has been enhanced by the addition of figures and rare photographs from the Shuttle-Centaur program, and two short reports:• Centaur for the 1980s, by John E. Niesley (Convair Division, General Dynamics); and• A High Energy Stage for the National Space Transportation System (NASA Tech. Memo. 83795), by Andrew J. Stofan (Lewis Research Center, NASA).
About the Author
Convair, which was a division of General Dynamics at the time of this report, was originally an American aircraft manufacturing company which later expanded into rockets and spacecraft. The company was formed in 1943 by the merger of Consolidated Aircraft and Vultee Aircraft. They produced a number of pioneering aircraft such as the Convair B-36 bomber, the F-102 Delta Dagger and the F-106 Delta Dart. It also manufactured the first Atlas rockets, including the rockets that were used for the pioneering manned orbital flights of Project Mercury and the first probes to the Moon and the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter. The company's subsequent Atlas-Centaur design continued this success and derivatives of the design remain in use as of 2010. A version of the Centaur stage was built for NASA's space shuttle, but the Challenger disaster in 1986 ended the program, mere months before the first Shuttle-Centaur was to have flown. In 1994 most of the company's divisions were sold by then-owners General Dynamics to McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed, with the remaining components deactivated in 1996.
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