WASHINGTON — The inaugural launch of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket faces recent delays after the corporate said it must make “minor reinforcements” to a part of the Centaur upper stage.
In a transient statement early June 24, ULA said it might remove the Centaur upper stage that had been installed on the Vulcan booster at Cape Canaveral for that inaugural launch and ship it back to the corporate’s Decatur, Alabama, factory. The Vulcan booster will remain on the Cape, stored in a horizontal processing facility.
The choice to destack the rocket got here after ULA accomplished the investigation into an anomaly during a March 29 test of a Centaur at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Hydrogen leaked from the Centaur, amassed contained in the test stand and ignited, damaging the stage.
ULA said within the statement it had identified the basis reason for that incident and crucial corrective actions. “Centaur’s thin-walled pressure stabilized tanks require minor reinforcement at the highest of the forward dome prior to flight. We plan to de-stack the Vulcan rocket and return the Centaur V to Decatur for modifications,” the corporate stated.
The corporate said it has several Centaur stages at Decatur, one in all which might be used to finish the qualification testing interrupted by the March incident.
ULA didn’t disclose a schedule for completing that testing, modifying the Centaur or rescheduling the inaugural launch of Centaur, a mission called Cert-1 by the corporate. The corporate said it should host a media teleconference in the subsequent few weeks to offer more details.
In an interview in May, Tory Bruno, president and chief executive of ULA, said that if the Centaur required no modifications he expected the Cert-1 launch to happen in early summer. If Centaur modifications are needed, that launch could be further delayed, “but I don’t expect it to get out of the yr.”
On the time of that interview, the last major test for Vulcan before its first launch was a static-fire test of the booster’s BE-4 engines on the pad, called the Flight Readiness Firing. That test took place June 7, and in the brand new statement ULA said it accomplished the review of knowledge from the firing and concluded “all test objectives were successfully achieved.”
The Cert-1 launch, when it does happen, will carry as its primary payload Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander. Also on the rocket might be two prototype satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband constellation in addition to a payload for space memorial company Celestis.