Centaur G-Prime Technical Description: A High-Performance Upper Stage for the NASA Space Transportation System

CENTAUR G-PRIME TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION: A HIGH-PERFORMANCE UPPER STAGE FOR THE NASA SPACE TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM The well-known and powerful Centaur upper stage, used with the Atlas and Titan boosters for decades, was a natural choice for an upper stage for the Space Shuttle. A new version of the Centaur, Shuttle-Centaur (aka STS-Centaur), was built by General Dynamics/Convair. The first Shuttle-Centaur stage and its payload (the Galileo mission to Jupiter) were being prepared for flight at Kennedy Space Center on the day of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. A suddenly more risk-averse NASA cancelled the Shuttle-Centaur program shortly thereafter. Two versions of the Shuttle-Centaur were to have been made: one for the military (G), one for NASA (G-prime). This report, prepared for NASA by the Convair Division of General Dynamics, provides a wealth of details about the structure, operation and processing of Shuttle-Centaur in general, and of G-Prime in particular. This report was originally published in 1984 as a spiral bound manual. This Expanded Edition (2014) has been enhanced by the addition of figures and rare photographs from the Shuttle-Centaur program, and two short reports: • Centaur for the 1980s, by John E. Niesley (Convair Division, General Dynamics); and • A High Energy Stage for the National Space Transportation System (NASA Tech. Memo. 83795), by Andrew J. Stofan (Lewis Research Center, NASA).