Taming Liquid Hydrogen - NASA's History Office

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Taming Liquid Hydrogen
to be attempted, OMB also believed that they would be far too costly. Ronnie G. Flippo, a
Democratic Congressman from Huntsville, Alabama, agreed with the White House’s decision
and actively lobbied against Centaur. Flippo was the chairman of the House Subcommittee on
Space Science and Applications, which was the committee that authorized all NASA funds.
Flippo attacked Centaur in a number of letters to his colleagues. His argument was that Centaur
was too expensive (at least $634 million), was of limited usefulness (primarily for just two space
missions), and was an example of the faulty sole-source procurement model (with General
Dynamics being the prime contractor without competitive bids). Lurking strongly in the background
of Flippo’s argument was local politics. His Alabama district included Marshall Space
Flight Center, which was designated as the Lead Center to manage any future NASA IUS
work. 13 However, Centaur did have its supporters in Congress, most notably Bill Lowery, who
was a California Republican. But just as local politics influenced Flippo, so too did they play a
major role in Lowery’s advocacy for Centaur. General Dynamics was located within his San
Diego district. Despite Flippo’s bias, NASA agreed with him over the protests of Lowery, and
they decided to utilize the Air Force-developed IUS.
In his Journey Into Space, Bruce Murray argues that this important subcommittee under
Flippo “looked at NASA through an Alabama prism.” 14 Marshall was desperately looking for
ways to regain greater responsibility in the space program. During the Saturn V era in the
1960s, Huntsville, Alabama, was a prime location for all the major aerospace contractors. When
the Apollo program ended in the 1970s and the charismatic leader of Marshall Space Flight
Center, Wernher von Braun, was stricken with cancer, the Center suddenly faced difficult times.
Its rival, Johnson Space Center, was awarded the Space Shuttle program, and the Marshall engineers
were faced with taking direction from another NASA Center. As a result, the mood at
Marshall became more and more defensive, and through Flippo, they vigorously rejected the
Centaur-in-Shuttle idea.
Besides Flippo’s advocacy, NASA had other reasons for selecting the IUS as the best choice
for the Shuttle. The consensus was that Centaur was too dangerous to fly in the Shuttle along
with humans. Centaur was never conceived as a human-rated machine. Its pressure-stabilized
tank design saved weight, but it was not necessarily seen as compatible with human flight. There
were two main concerns: Centaur’s lack of structure reinforcement and the inability of the
Shuttle to land safely if Centaur could not be deployed and remained in the cargo bay. Centaur
was essentially one continuous tank that had no internal reinforcement to give it added stability.
A double-walled bulkhead kept the liquid hydrogen separated from the liquid oxygen. Heat
transfer between the two cryogenic liquids was prevented by a phenomenon known as “cryo-
13 M. Mitchell Waldrop, “Centaur Wars,” Science 217 (10 September 1982): 1012–1014.
14 Bruce Murray, Journey Into Space: The First Three Decades of Space Exploration (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989):
213.