The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has delayed the planned Cape Canaveral launch next week of an advanced geosynchronous orbit Orion eavesdropping spacecraft on board a Boeing Delta IV Heavy booster.

The delay to mid January comes as the U.S. Air Force is troubleshooting problems with its Northrop/Grumman Defense Support Program (DSP) 23 spacecraft already positioned in a stationary orbit.

DSP ground controllers have lost at least some command and control capability due to a software or hardware failure on that satellite and NRO engineers want to make sure there is no commonality in software, hardware or operations that also could affect the electronic intelligence satellite.

Even before the DSP problems, the night launch had the NRO, U.S. Air Force and many intelligence professionals in the National Security Agency (NSA) worried.

This is because the NRO flight fundamentally involves America's biggest, most secret and expensive military spacecraft on board the world's largest rocket. The satellite had experienced delays even after arrival here at the Cape.

Liftoff of the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta IV Heavy carrying the highly upgraded Orion NROL-26 eavesdropping satellite had been set for Dec. 16-18 from Cape Canaveral's Launch Complex 37. The combined cost of the NROL-26 spacecraft and booster is upwards of $2 billion.

The 232-foot tall triple barreled oxygen/hydrogen powered booster will lift off on 2 million pounds of thrust from its three Pratt & Whitney RS-68 engines, then fly into geosynchronous orbit on a Pratt & Whitney RL10B-2 upper stage that includes French and Japanese hardware.

There is worry among intelligence professionals, however, because this will be the first flight of the upgraded Orion class, following three years of delays in getting this specific satellite built and launched. That has pushed the span of time to five years between the launch of the last NRO geosynchronous eavesdropper here and this modernized version.

However, two different smaller NRO eavesdropping spacecraft have been launched during this period on Delta IV Medium boosters fired from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. Those satellites do not park in a single location, but rather cycle up and down in highly elliptical orbits that climb and descend over the northern hemisphere. Like NROL-26, they too can pick up clandestine radio traffic, but monitor it from different aspect angles than the geosynchronous satellites.

Since the last geosynchronous eavesdropping mission here in 2003, NRO has been widely criticized for mismanagement of projects like its Future Imagery Architecture program, and the in orbit failure of the advanced USA 193 imaging satellite. That spacecraft launched from Vandenberg in December 2007 and died almost immediately after launch. It was then destroyed in orbit by a U.S. Navy missile to prevent its frozen ball of hydrazine propellant from harming anyone on the ground (Aerospace DAILY, Feb. 22).

The failure was caused by a software problem that an investigation found was in other military satellites also awaiting launch.

The NRO also continues to be criticized for a lack of imagination since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Photo: USAF