Centaur to Send Spacecraft to Jupiter, Sun : New Booster Rolled Out in San Diego

General Dynamics, Air Force and NASA officials rolled out a new development in interplanetary travel Tuesday with a flurry of excitement reminiscent of the halcyon days of the space program in the 1960s.

The Centaur upper-stage booster, a recently completed high-energy launching system, will allow larger spacecraft to execute longer interplanetary explorations, including a probe of Jupiter.

More than 300 people, most of them General Dynamics employees, gathered at the company’s Kearny Mesa plant to applaud the completion of the rocket that will catapult NASA spacecraft from the space shuttle on two investigative missions next spring.

“I almost had tears in my eyes when they rolled that thing out,” said Craig Thompson, a General Dynamics operations representative. “I hate to see it go.”

General Dynamics, a NASA contractor for more than 20 years, had been working on the massive rocket for 18 months. The company manufactures a similar unit for the Air Force.

The NASA Centaur, which is approximately 29 feet long and 14 feet wide, is capable of sending a 13,000-pound spacecraft into the outer regions of space, NASA officials said. The space shuttle will transport a spacecraft attached to the Centaur into the outer regions of Earth’s atmosphere, where the Centaur will break away from the shuttle, then launch the craft into outer space.

“The Centaur high-energy launch unit will allow us to accomplish missions we could only dream about a few years ago,” said Jesse Moore, NASA’s associate administrator for space flight.

The Centaur is scheduled to launch NASA’s Ulysses probe of the polar regions of the sun and the Galileo mission to Jupiter next May. In both missions, the shuttle and its crew will return to Earth, leaving the spacecraft to continue on its course through space.

During the 2 1/2-year Galileo mission, the spacecraft will orbit Jupiter 11 times, allowing NASA officials to investigate the planet’s atmosphere.

The 5 1/2-year Ulysses mission will be NASA’s first observation of the polar regions of the sun.

During the Ulysses mission, a modified Centaur will send the spacecraft toward Jupiter, where the planet’s gravity will slingshot the spacecraft out toward unexplored solar latitudes. Data taken during the Ulysses mission could open the door for future probes of the sun, said Joan Sherley, General Dynamics space systems manager. The Centaur launching unit can get spacecraft closer to the sun than launch missiles used in previous attempts could, she said.