Three rockets carrying military payloads, which would have helped with such tasks as catching terrorists and watching for unfriendly missiles, and two rockets with commercial payloads failed between August 1998 and May 1999. John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists said he was prepared to believe it was just a string of bad luck. Then he saw the Air Force report, which blamed the accidents on cutbacks in quality control staff by Lockheed Martin, poor engineering and workmanship at Lockheed and Boeing and lax monitoring by the military. Lockheed Martin, maker of the Titan IV rockets that failed with military payloads, had drastically cut back its quality assurance staff from more than 200 people in the 1980s to about 75. That's a huge cut.
Launch costs are a very small part of total military space costs.
The report also blamed the Pentagon, which cut by more than half its monitoring of Lockheed and Boeing. In addition to military payloads such as spy satellites, the rockets lift into space the satellites that keep the nation's cellular phones and pagers ringing. All three military payload failures involved Titan IV rockets. In August 1998 an electrical short caused a Titan to explode just after liftoff. In April of this year, a missile-warning satellite was left in the wrong orbit because of faulty electrical connector tape on the rocket.