Saturn is about 900 million miles from the Sammamish River Valley, but the two places now share a common bond.
Both have rocket engines built in Redmond.
The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, orbiting Saturn and sending back stunning images yesterday, was put there thanks to some local rocket scientists.
"It was a $3 billion mission that depended upon our engines working perfectly," said Steve Harper of Aerojet in Redmond.
On Wednesday evening, when NASA's Cassini spacecraft was approaching the most critical moment of its $3.3 billion mission -- threading through a gap in the rings of Saturn at about 50,000 mph -- about 40 engineers and scientists at Aerojet were watching with keen interest.
Harper's team built the primary rocket engine for Cassini. The engine had to fire for precisely 96 minutes to counter Saturn's gravitational pull enough to allow the spacecraft to go into orbit for its four-year mission of observation around the mysterious sixth planet.
"We've never had a failure," said Harper, noting that prior to the mission NASA attempted to test his engines "to destruction" and, well, failed to destroy them. The rockets from Redmond have so far worked flawlessly forNASA's most ambitious unmanned mission. Cassini, with 18 scientific instruments and cameras, is widely regarded as the most complex spacecraft ever launched by the space agency.
Jon Schierberl and his team at Aerojet were responsible for 16 smaller (8-inch long), precision "thrusters" used by Cassini to position itself.
These small rocket engines will be critical for the craft for many years as it needs to alter or adjust its trajectory in orbit.
But nothing comes close to what was required of the Aerojet engines during the dangerous approach Wednesday through Saturn's rings -- massive gravitational spirals of ice, rock and dust that act in ways scientists still find confusing and unpredictable.
Moving at such high speeds, Cassini had an extremely small margin of error and high demand for accuracy in its approach for orbit. Schierberl offered this analogy:
"What we had to do was like having somebody hit a golf ball from a flatbed truck traveling at 60 miles an hour down a Los Angeles freeway and make a hole in one in Dallas," he said. "We take a certain amount of pride in what we do."
What Aerojet does, among other things, is supply 90 percent of all the rocket engines used by NASA spacecraft. The Redmond branch of this California-based company has built something like 10,000 rocket engines in its 40-some years of operation.
"We're the largest manufacturer of small rocket engines in the world," said Bill Smith, director of strategic planning at Aerojet. The team in Redmond, Smith said, has worked on engines for the space shuttle, the Apollo program and every NASA spacecraft mission except Galileo (which went to a European firm).
The two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, were launched on rockets using Aerojet engines and used the company's tiny "thrusters" for course correction in space. The rockets of Redmond also powered NASA's comet-chasing Stardust mission, led by the University of Washington's Donald Brownlee. The list goes on, and all the way back to Apollo.
So why have so few in the Puget Sound region heard about Aerojet?
"We've kept a pretty low profile, but not intentionally," Smith said.
Much of their work is classified because rocket engine design is considered a strategic resource, he acknowledged. But Aerojet's low profile also could be due to all of their name changes -- caused by ownership changes -- from the original Rocket Research (launched in the 1960s by engineers who left Boeing) to Olin Aerospace, Primex and now Aerojet.
"We've got a good fit, finally, with Aerojet," Smith said. The company, headquartered in Sacramento, acquired the Redmond rocket scientists in 2002, he said, and has been moving aggressively into positioning itself as a leader in the field of space research and development.
The Cassini spacecraft was launched in 1997, by a Titan rocket -- again using Aerojet engines.
"Bill and I were there for the launch," Schierberl noted. "This has been 10 years in the making."
Another reason for the low profile is that the Redmond rocket scientists are seldom identified as the creators of these rocket engines. The credit tends to go to the bigger contractors, the Lockheeds or the Boeings, who put the final assembly together and to the folks down in Pasadena at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
With the success on Wednesday, the media reported lots of whooping and hollering as the JPL crew celebrated their success in putting Cassini into orbit around Saturn.
For the Redmond rocket scientists, it was no big deal. What's to celebrate?
"We expect to succeed," Harper said.
P-I reporter Tom Paulson can be reached at 206-448-8318 or [email protected]
