WywiadWright: All of these requirements and agreements had been set in place before you moved into that position.
Aldridge: Before I moved in. This was in 1978. I believe Jimmy Carter wrote a presidential directive that the Space Shuttle is going to be at—and what we were told is that he didn’t write the actual 55 flights a year, but it would meet all the demands of all the users. That was 1978. Well, in 1981—in fact, in April of 1981 we had the first Shuttle flight. At that point, it was clear that some of these statements of capabilities were going to be way lacking, that the turnaround time was not seven days, it was much, much more than that. Of the five orbiters, only four had been bought, two of which were so heavy they couldn’t meet the DoD demands. We only had two orbiters that could meet the DoD weight and size demands. The cost was not one third of the cost of an expendable; it was more likely equal at best, and possibly much higher than that.
In April when we first started to see this, we began to worry that well, maybe we were not going to meet the demands of the Department of Defense. We had a requirement for 12 flights a year from the Shuttle. Our estimates of what we were seeing as turnaround time said you might be able to fly 24 flights per year, but 12 to 18 was more likely the number. If it was going to be at the lower end, or even at 18 per year, we were going to take 12. We had a hard requirement to fly 12 flights. This meant the civil and commercial space business was not going to be as robust as we thought it was going to be. We with national security priority could preempt the launch of a commercial satellite in order to get a national security satellite up. It was highly uncertain whether or not any of the commercial or civil programs were going to have much viability if the orbiter flight rate was in the 12 to 18 per year.
So we started getting worried. Well, in 1983 I decided—it was my decision—looking at the flight rate, what our demand was, what the performance of the Shuttle was at that point in time—by then we had flown four flights, and much more robust data that was showing it wasn’t going to be anywhere close to 55 flights per year. NASA was still touting it was going to fly 24. It could fly 24 with the four orbiters. That was [NASA Administrator] [James] Jim Beggs who made that announcement.
Well, I decided we ought to not terminate expendable launch vehicles. In 1978, we were to start phasing down the expendable launch vehicles, because we were no longer going to use them. All the production of the expendable launchers showed an end date that was going to be probably in the 1986 period. We were flying three different [expendable launch system] vehicles, a Delta, an Atlas, and a Titan. The production lines were showing a tail-off of those. All the satellites that we had that were flying on the expendable launch vehicles, because the Shuttle bay was different and the loads on the Shuttle and the acoustics were so much different that we had to redesign all the national security payloads to fit in the Shuttle bay and to take the Shuttle environment. Since we were paying by the linear foot rather than the diameter, all the national security payloads got short and fat, because that’s how they charged us.
Side note. If you now look at the Titan IV, you’ll notice it has a great big bulbous nose. That was because as we went from the Shuttle back to the expendables, we had to put the new satellite on the old booster. So it was short and fat, and that’s why you have a big bulbous nose on the Titan IV.
In ’83, I went to the Secretary of Defense and said, “I believe we should not terminate the production of expendable launch vehicles until the Shuttle can prove itself, that it can fly at least 24 flights per year, and it can meet the performance demands of the Department of Defense, therefore we should keep a number of expendable launch vehicles continuing.” He agreed, went to the President [Reagan], and the President agreed, and so we put together a budget to send to Congress that would continue the Titan production line for five more years, and we would buy two vehicles per year for the critical payloads that the Titan launched. We also converted an old Titan II ICBM [Intercontinental Ballistic Missile] to a space launch vehicle that could launch the very small satellites that we didn’t want to have to try to integrate a little satellite into the Shuttle bay. It should not launch small satellites all by itself, it was far too expensive. But we needed weather satellites launched, so the Titan II launched from Vandenberg. We converted 14 of those to launch weather satellites. Our plan was laid out, and NASA fought it.
Wright: Very bold statement, when so many of the people who were in the development stage of the Shuttle said that so much of what they wanted for the Shuttle, for the orbiter, was dictated by the Air Force, not what they [NASA] wanted.
Aldridge: Well, see, it’s very interesting. It is correct. The Shuttle bay was designed to fit the Manned Orbiting Laboratory [MOL], which is a program by the Air Force that was going to put men in space in a reconnaissance satellite. The other issue was that they wanted to have the ability to abort from orbit, so if you got into orbit, had engine failure, and you couldn’t reach full orbit but had to come back and land, you wanted to have enough maneuverability in the Shuttle to maneuver about 1,000 miles off from where you were to where the launch site was by the time you made one orbit. So those wings had to be built on it.
The Shuttle bay size and the launch weights were dictated by the Department of Defense. But if they could not fly the Department of Defense payloads, then the economic rationale that was dictated why we wanted the Shuttle and why we wanted it to be the exclusive launch vehicle went away. Without the Department of Defense, they had no Shuttle. They had to accommodate DoD requirements. That’s sure enough what happened.
But in the idea of continuing the expendable launch vehicle program, NASA got very upset about it. Jim Beggs in particular, because he saw that as a move by the Air Force—and the Air Force basically represented the Department of Defense, the Air Force was responsible for launching all Department of Defense satellites, which included Navy and Air Force and NRO. He got very upset and tried to, through his contacts with the Congress, to get Congress to deny us the funding for the continuation of the expendable launch vehicles. He testified he saw it as a ploy of the Air Force to remove itself ultimately from the Shuttle and go back to all expendable launch vehicles. Therefore, the result of the Air Force and DoD going off of the Shuttle, in his mind, is it made it less viable for commercial launches of satellites, which were then planned to fly on the Shuttle.
So he, through his congressional contacts, continued to stress that this was not the right thing to do. We had quite a battle between ourselves and NASA. Finally, the national security adviser, I think it was Bud McFarlane contacted the Secretary of Defense, and NASA, and me—I represented the Department of Defense at this time as Under Secretary of the Air Force—to get together and come to a compromise. So we did.
We met in the Old Executive Office Building. Jim Beggs and I. Jim kept saying, “You guys can’t get off the Shuttle,” and I said, “We will sign up that we will buy at least one third of all the missions the Shuttle can fly in any given year, we’ll guarantee at least one third.” In fact, we were showing probably half, because Jim was saying still 24 flights a year. At that time, we were saying 12. But that’s another story. So we said, “We’ll buy one third of them, guaranteed.” He said, “Okay, but I also want you to help us work on the next generation of launch vehicles.” I said, “We’ll do that.” The Shuttle follow-on. We would determine what the fair pricing policy was at this particular time.
The reason for that, again I got to diverge a little bit. What was happening between the Air Force and NASA at the time was the Air Force had signed up with a certain set of interface requirements of their satellite in the Shuttle. If there were some things unique, like the clampdown mechanisms that were unique for that satellite against the Shuttle, the Air Force would pay for it. All other non-unique things in the Shuttle bay, that would be a NASA obligation, and therefore our pricing policy was based on the linear foot, any unique things associated with the satellite. Then other non-unique things, that was NASA.
Well, about every week NASA kept throwing these non-unique requirements over to the Department of Defense. It was angering a lot of people. We put in our budget a certain price to fly on the Shuttle, and all of a sudden NASA says, “No, the cost just went up 10%.” This antagonism of the pricing policy and the antagonism of the expendable launch vehicle versus Shuttle had a very high tension rate between the Department of Defense, the Air Force, and NASA.[...]
https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NASA_HQ/Administrators/AldridgeEC/AldridgeEC_5-29-09.htmEdward (Pete) Cleveland AldridgeGovernment official; Astronaut; Company executive
Area Leadership, Policy, and Communications
Specialty Public Affairs and Public Policy
Elected 2013
Mr. Edward Cleveland Aldridge Jr. was former Secretary of the Air Force, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, Chief Executive Officer, and Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics. He was scheduled to fly as an astronaut in the late 1980s but his mission was canceled in the wake of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. He served in many senior U.S. Defense Department and defense industry positions, including director of the National Reconnaissance Office, 1981-1988, undersecretary of the Air Force, 1981-1986, and secretary of the Air Force, 1986-1988. From 1989 to 1992 he was president of the Electronic Systems Company division of McDonnell Douglas, and later, CEO of the Aerospace Corporation. He retired from his position as undersecretary of defense in 2003 and accepted President George W. Bush's appointment to chair the Commission on the Implementation of U.S. Space Exploration Policy. He is also a former board member of Lockheed Martin and Sybase Inc. Awards include being a recipient of the Department of Defense Distinguished Civilian Service Award and Distinguished Public Service Award, and the Wright Brothers Memorial Award.Last Updated Jul 2025
https://www.amacad.org/person/edward-pete-cleveland-aldridge(1)
Aldridge On the IssuesBy Edgar Ulsamer and Edgar Ulsamer July 1, 1986
Growing up some thirty years ago in Shreveport, La., right across the river from Barksdale AFB, Edward C. “Pete” Aldridge, Jr., learned, as he puts it, to “look up” to the US Air Force and the leaders who made it great. The Shreveport teenager’s admiration begot a dream—some time, in some form, to join the Air Force team. In August 1981, that dream came true when he joined the “team” as Under Secretary of the Air Force. Over the intervening five years, Mr. Aldridge became one of the most respected and longest-tenured occupants of that office.
His outstanding performance was not lost on the Defense Department’s leadership and the White House. On April 7, following the resignation of Russell A. Rourke for weighty personal reasons, President Reagan named Mr. Aldridge the seventeenth and newest Secretary of the Air Force, making him the civilian head of the service that he had first learned to admire three decades ago. At this writing, Senate confirmation of his new assignment is pending.
The prospect of leading what he calls the greatest Air Force in the world puts a king-size lump in the throat of this normally unflappable, erstwhile aerospace engineer and defense analyst: “It is almost more than this person can endure.” Pete Aldridge seems tailor-made for the high office that he has just assumed. He holds a bachelor of science degree in aeronautical engineering from Texas A&M and a master of science degree, also in aeronautical engineering, from Georgia Tech.
For a number of years following his professional schooling, he held engineering and, eventually, management slots in the aerospace industry. For five years thereafter, he served as a Defense Department systems analyst and as an advisor to the US SALT I team in Helsinki and Vienna. After a year as senior manager with an aerospace company, he was named a senior management associate in the White House Office of Management and Budget. Next came two years as a senior OSD executive charged with oversight of strategic programs and then an assignment as principal advisor to the Secretary of Defense in the field of planning and program evaluation of US military forces and force structure. During the Carter era, Mr. Aldridge served as a vice president in a respected think tank responsible for a range of defense planning and analysis functions. The incoming Reagan Administration quickly picked him for the job of Air Force Under Secretary.
The Priorities Are Right
In an interview with this writer, the new head of the Department of the Air Force posed a rhetorical question: “What is Pete Aldridge going to do about the priorities [of the Air Force that have evolved over the past five years of the Reagan Administration]?” The answer, he said, “is nothing. The priorities are right, the Air Force is on a roll, and I don’t see any reason to change the winning game plan that we came up with.” The top priority that he inherited from his predecessors and the one that he views above all others as sacrosanct is “people. Keeping quality people certainly will always be at the top of my list. You can have the greatest, fanciest aircraft in the world, but if you don’t have quality people to maintain them and fly them, they won’t do you much good.”
Ranking right behind this imperative, in Secretary Aldridge’s view, are “readiness and sustainability.”
The fact that he sees no intrinsic need for reordering either general or mission-area priorities doesn’t mean there won’t be adjustments, he emphasized. Two factors that come into play here involve pending drastic budget cuts, on the one hand, and structural changes that are likely to ensue from the Administration’s implementation of the findings of the Blue Ribbon (Packard) Commission on Defense Management, Secretary Aldridge acknowledged.
In the first instance, he harbors few illusions. Maintaining the rate of budget growth experienced by the Air Force over the past five years is not in the cards that are being dealt by Congress. “At best, we might be able to sustain a very limited real growth, and it’s going to be tougher to get the military manpower to man our forces,” he warns. But there is a mitigating factor: “We are starting from a solid base, [because over] the past five years, we were able to take our budget from $42 billion to about $100 billion.”
Concomitantly, over the past five years, USAF’s flying hours shot up by twenty-two percent, aircraft mission-capable rates by forty-four percent, sorties per pilot by fifteen percent, air-to-air capability by sixty-five percent, strategic airlift capability by twenty-five percent, and “force-multiplier” space programs by a staggering 384 percent. The contention by congressional malcontents that the $1 trillion that the country has spent on national security over the past five years has bought nothing is, he asserted, “garbage.”
The “down side” of freezing defense spending is that “the threat hasn’t gone away, and that is what should set our requirements, not how much money” the country is willing to spend on defense, he points out. It follows that some tough choices lie ahead. “The programs that we started over the past few years in anticipation of continued high growth [are in for] close scrutiny.” As a consequence, “Sick programs are not long for this world.” A case in point is PLSS, the precision location strike system (see “In Focus . . . ” p. 24 of this issue).
Any program that has “the slightest degree of problem” in terms of cost, schedule, or performance or that lacks a rock-solid base in terms of requirements will be looked at closely and critically and may be headed for the chopping block, he emphasizes.
The Impact of the Packard Report
The impact of the President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on the current structure of the Air Force, while not fully sorted out, is likely to be significant, Secretary Aldridge suggests: “It is clear, if you put Packard [meaning the provisions of the Commission] against the current structure of our program management, that there will have to be some changes.” The Defense Department and the Air Force are looking at the alternatives for adapting current resource allocation and program management functions to the matrix drawn up by the Presidential Commission. For the time being, however, “we don’t know yet what the changes should be.”
What, in the Pentagon’s view, does seem clear, however, is that the management functions ought to be carried out on two distinct tracks, he. suggested. The resource allocation function flows from the President to the Secretary of Defense and then to the service Secretaries, with the basic objective of fitting essential programs into a given budget and then funding them. The program management function starts where the resource allocation task leaves off. The Packard Commission’s matrix notwithstanding, “somehow we will have to continue to manage the resource allocation process,
and somehow we will have to manage our programs.”
Secretary Aldridge suggested that the Packard Commission’s recommendations in areas affecting military organization and command structure—in the main, the call to broaden the authority of the unified commanders—require no drastic changes on the part of the Air Force. The reason is that the Air Force already “does an excellent job of supporting the CINCs.”
The Packard Commission, he added, might have overlooked some of the cooperative measures already undertaken by the Air Force in terms of CINC support, with the result that “we are in better shape than the Commission gives us credit for.” He pointed out that the Air Force’s four-star general officers, several of whom serve as CINCs, participate fully and actively from start to finish in the development of the program objective memorandum (POM) that in effect is the Air Force’s five-year plan. He stressed that this participation extends from the early stages of the POM process—when requirements are juxtaposed with the budget bogeys and “disconnects,” meaning critical omissions, are resolved—to the stage when adjustments necessitated by cuts are made and then all the way to formulation of the complete document that is delivered to OSD. The Air Force component commanders, he stressed, also “are doing an excellent job” in supporting their CINCs. As a result, Secretary Aldridge sees no compelling need for major adjustments in the way the Air Force operates in the joint-service arena.
Wątek: EC 'Pete' Aldridge, Jr. - 18.08.1938 (Przeczytany 188 razy)