Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you, sir. (Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Patrick McCarthy with FBR Capital Markets.
Patrick McCarthy - FBR Capital Markets
Hi. Good morning, and congratulations on another great quarter.
I was wondering if you'd take just a couple of minutes and walk through Taurus II from the perspective of what are the significant technical risks that you think you need to overcome over the next several years as you develop that program and how are you trying to manage them?
Dave Thompson
Good morning, Patrick. Sure, I'll - let me start on that one, and J. R. may want to add his perspective as well.
First of all, in order to reduce technical risk and to minimize and better control our development costs and our development time schedule, we are using to the maximum extent we can subsytems, components and design and production approaches borrowed directly from the company's other space launch and interceptor rockets.
However, Taurus II does present us with several new technical challenges that we're very focused on. Those tend to be centered on the first stage of the three-stage rocket and involve both the main engines that are being provided to us by Aerojet and the structure and tankage for the first stage being developed and built by Yuzhnoye and Yuzhmash in the Ukraine. There are also very important technical aspects to the interface between the first stage and the engines that have to be carefully considered and monitored.
So from an overall risk standpoint, the number one and two items on our list of things to pay the highest attention to are the main engines and the first stage and the interaction of those two. Following that and also interacting with those items are the ground facilities and infrastructure at the launch site that we will select, as J. R. indicated, within the next month.
In terms of our approaches to risk mitigation, first of all by selecting the Aerojet engines which have a substantial amount of developmental and test history to them - we're, although not eliminating, we're minimizing the risk of introducing a new engine into this program, and by working with our partners in the Ukraine who have 50 years of experience with similar systems dating back to the earliest days of the then-Soviet Union's ICBM and space launch programs are among the most capable organizations in the world for building systems of this class. They currently produce the Zenit sea launch and its corresponding land-launched configurations for launching bigger satellites, and we are relying on that design and production experience to the maximum extent we can.
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