Utah firm is key in NASA launch

ATK Thiokol is headed to the moon, says NASA.

The Utah rocket-maker's solid fuel boosters are critical components in the space agency's $104 billion plans announced Monday to send humans back to the moon within the next 13 years, NASA administrator Michael Griffin said in a press briefing. The plan keeps the space agency on course for a landing on Mars and other explorations of the solar system, he added.

"Think of it as Apollo on steroids," Griffin said when noting similarities between the new plans and the Apollo lunar landing missions of the 1960s and '70s.

The briefing, held at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., was carried live on the Internet. Designs that Griffin unveiled for a crew-carrying rocket and a heavier vehicle to haul cargo into space looked a lot like proposals Thiokol had developed months ago.

"There's a color schematic difference, but it's basically identical" to the Thiokol proposal, said ATK corporate spokesman Bryce Hallowell.

Assuming NASA remains on track with the moon project, the announcement means the Thiokol operation in northern Utah will continue building giant boosters for the foreseeable future.

"It's great news for ATK and it's great news for our employees in Utah," said Hallowell, interviewed by telephone from ATK headquarters in Edina, Minn. Both rockets in the next generation of space vehicles "will use the solid rocket motors that ATK produces in Utah."

Of 4,500 ATK employees in the Beehive State, about 3,000 work with the boosters in some capacity, whether building them at Promontory, Box Elder County, or refurbishing them after spaceflight in Thiokol's Clearfield plant, according to Hallowell.

Griffin said the design for the moon rockets "is the product of an intensive summer of work by hundreds of folks here at the agency."

The rocket design largely uses existing technology:

• Crew Launch Vehicle. The smaller of two rockets could carry either astronauts or cargo. Its first stage would be a Thiokol solid-fuel booster and the second a liquid-fuel shuttle main engine. Unlike the shuttle, which carries a large fuel tank sticking out to the side, the liquid fuel would be in line with the engine.

This set-up would be capable of lifting 25 metric tons (27.6 standard tons) to low Earth orbit.