Taming Liquid Hydrogen - NASA's History Office

Chapter 5
The Giant Titan-Centaur
“But when Viking came along—it was the first Mars lander—it was
too heavy for the Atlas-Centaur so we had to go with a bigger booster,
Titan . . . . All that effort spent to integrate the Centaur to the Titan,
[and] we only launched it seven times, because by the time we launched
Voyager the Shuttle was on the horizon and it was going to displace
expendable launch vehicles.”
The Giant Titan-Centaur 139
—Joe Nieberding, Lewis Research Center
While Atlas-Centaur was proving its heavy lift capability, a giant launch vehicle that delivered
even more power emerged in 1974—Centaur coupled with a Titan IIIE booster.
Titan-Centaur was capable of lifting unprecedented heavy science missions. The heaviest
Atlas-Centaur planetary launch was the 2,201-pound Mariner 9 spacecraft; Titan-Centaur
would more than triple this capability with the launch of the 7,767-pound Viking probe.
Wernher von Braun, once skeptical that a liquid-hydrogen upper stage was even feasible, showered
the new Titan-Centaur with high praise shortly before its first launch. In Popular Science,
he announced the flightworthiness of a “new generation of heavyweight interplanetary spacecraft.” 1
Standing 160 feet tall, the Titan-Centaur launch vehicle would give scientists the capability to learn
more secrets about the solar system than ever before. With a hint of regret, von Braun further wrote
that the Titan “has the prospect of becoming NASA’s largest launch vehicle in active use since our
two remaining Saturn V’s are unassigned and mothballed.” Wernher von Braun’s praise was justified.
Bigger and more powerful than Atlas-Centaur, Titan III-Centaur proved to be one of the most
powerful and flexible launch vehicle systems ever designed.
Titan-Centaur launched key science missions to the Sun, Mars, and Jupiter with the Helios,
Viking, and Voyager probes. Ironically, despite its dramatic impact on the planetary space
program, NASA gave this Titan III-Centaur a life of only seven launches. Even before the Titan-
1 Wernher von Braun, “Our Biggest Interplanetary Rocket,” Popular Science (July 1974): 62.