It looks like there is yet another player in the commercial space game. This week, Alliant Techsystems (ATK) announced its intention to have a full system, named Liberty, to get astronauts and cargo to low Earth orbit up and running by 2015. It's hard to see why having another company vying for a chance to help NASA is a bad thing, and this new player might just beat out all the competition.Right now, America's future manned space doesn't look great with NASA paying $63 million per seat for rides to the ISS on the Russian Soyuz. But there are a number of systems under development to bring launch capability back to American soil. NASA is working on the Space Launch System that may or may not come to fruition, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin project is working on a launch vehicle, and Sierra Nevada is working on the Dream Chaser orbital vehicle. In the nearer future, we can expect to see SpaceX launch its Dragon capsule on a Falcon 9 rocket to the ISS this month and Orbital Sciences do the same later this year.So what makes ATK's stand out from the pack? The company's legacy, for one. Born from a long series of mergers and name changes it has Honeywell Inc. and Morton Thiokol, the company behind the space shuttle's solid rock boosters, as its parents. The Liberty rocket was proposed to NASA by ATK and Astrium, the company behind the European Space Agency's Ariane 5 rocket, as part of the Commercial Orbital Transfer System program, which is the same program under which SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are currently operating.The Liberty rocket is made from pieces of ATK's legacy. The first stage is a larger version of the space shuttle's solid rocket booster and the upper stage is the liquid fueled core of the Ariane 5. That's only half the equation. This week ATK announced its intention to add a spacecraft to the rocket making it one of the few companies to have a whole launch system built in-house.For the spacecraft, ATK turned to Lockheed-Martin, a company that's home to skilled engineers and decades of experience in the spaceflight business. Before they merged in 1995, both companies had outstanding projects under their names. Lockheed built the SR-71 and the U-2 and Martin built the Vanguard and Titan rockets NASA used in its early days.The inclusion of a spacecraft and launch abort system – a necessary feature of all COTS systems – means that Liberty might be more than a backup ferry for NASA. It's projected launch costs are so low that it could end up being the vehicle that takes over all government and commercial satellite launches. It also makes it a multipurpose rocket, reconfigurable for manned missions as well as cargo and satellite launches. In fact, the similarities between ATK and SpaceX – reconfigurable vehicles on a similar schedule to launch men by 2015 for a fraction of the Soyuz launch cost – make each the other's main competition.Competition isn't a bad thing, especially when big technologies are concerned. It often breeds success and results. I wouldn't say I'd like to see another Cold War, but the race to the Moon did yield some of the most impressive technological advances in a short time frame when spaceflight was almost entirely unknown. It's very possible that the pressure between ATK and SpaceX will end with the United States having its own launch capability again sooner rather than later.Having two full systems operating also wouldn't hurt. Each could serve as a backup for the other. Say SpaceX were scheduled to launch a crew to the ISS but some technical issue surfaced that would take months to solve. Instead of putting the launch off, ATK could come in and launch the mission without losing too much time.The full ATK system – the Liberty launch vehicle and unmanned spacecraft with launch abort system – is scheduled to make its first test launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Centre in 2014. If all goes well, manned flights could follow as early as 2015. It will be interesting to see how the competition plays out between ATK and SpaceX but, whatever the outcome, it will be a boon to America's space program.
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