Here Come the US Space Marines!

In July 2002, the Marine Corps released a Universal Needs Statement that defined the Small Unit Space Transport and Insertion (SUSTAIN) concept that, if successful, will give the US a “…heretofore unimaginable assault support speed, range, altitude and strategic surprise” capability. SUSTAIN is an RLV that will carry a squad (13 men) into space and land it anywhere on Earth within two hours with, among other requirements, “flexible launch on demand… to any orbital inclination.”

According to the needs statement, SUSTAIN is required because the US has virtually no ability to respond rapidly to current intelligence. This means that if there are strong indicators that a major terrorist leader is hiding in a particular village, it will take anywhere between 12 to 48 hours before the US military could launch an attempt to capture or kill him. To put it another way, intelligence information can move at the speed of light but commando forces, no matter how good, can only move at the speed of a C-17 or other transport aircraft.

When this requirement was published, the reaction of the space community, including many RLV advocates was, to put it politely, extremely skeptical. Neither the major defense contractors nor the space entrepreneurs have shown that they have any ability to build SUSTAIN, or even to demonstrate that the systems and materials needed could be developed in less than a decade. At first glance, it looks like a typical example of US technological overreach. On closer examination, though, it would seem that the men and women who wrote this requirement were not smoking illegal substances, but rather had a time frame in mind that more or less conforms to historical experience.

In his July 2003 statement to the Senate Subcommittee of Science, Technology and Space, Marine Corps Brigadier General Richard Zilmer said that “this challenging requirement is projected for initial operating capability (IOC) between 2025 and 2030.” That is, about 32 to 37 years after the first flight of the DC-X, which is the true precursor of the entire RLV idea. If one adds ten years, due to the usual delays inherent in any program of this sort, one gets near the half century that it seems to take to bring any revolutionary new major aerospace system into full service.

A realistic IOC date for SUSTAIN would thus be between 2035 and 2045. From the present until then, one can expect that the problems of materials, flight controls, and propulsion that now doom any near-term RLV effort will be solved. Just as similar problems on the V-22 were taken care of by advances in computer technology and engine design, a small-scale but long-term effort to take advantage of future technological progress could realistically lead to a decision to go ahead with the development of a SUSTAIN-type vehicle sometime around 2020.

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