United Launch Alliance is closing in on the debut flight of the Vulcan rocket, and it stays on target to fly the vehicle for the primary time on December 24.
During a media roundtable on Wednesday afternoon, the chief executive of United Launch Alliance, Tory Bruno, said, “The trail to flight one is evident” for Vulcan. The last major piece of hardware for the rocket, the Centaur V upper stage, arrived at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Monday. The entire qualification testing mandatory for the primary flight, including for the upper stage, is complete.
In the approaching days, Bruno said the Centaur upper stage can be integrated with the Vulcan first stage. Then, the combined vehicle will probably be rolled to the launch site for a fueling test referred to as a wet dress rehearsal in December. Nonetheless, the rocket’s most important engines, BE-4s provided by Blue Origin, won’t be fired. That is because the primary stage already accomplished this hot fire test successfully in June.
Bruno said United Launch Alliance, or ULA, has some margin in its schedule as it really works toward a launch at 1:49 am ET on Christmas Eve. If the weather is poor, the corporate also has launch opportunities on December 25 and 26 before the closure of the launch window this yr. The “Certification 1” mission would then have one other launch opportunity through the first half of January.
As its primary payload, the Certification 1 mission will carry a lunar lander built by Astrobotic, which is able to try and make a soft touchdown on the Moon early next yr.
Waiting for Vulcan
Vulcan has been a protracted time coming. ULA has been developing the rocket for greater than a decade because it sought to construct a heavy lift rocket to interchange its fleet of Atlas and Delta rockets. The change was driven by two major needs. One, the corporate needed a rocket more cost-competitive with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters. And two, the US Congress mandated that ULA end its reliance on the Russia-made engines that power the Atlas V rocket.
The large rocket was originally attributable to launch in 2020 but has slipped attributable to several issues, including the prolonged development means of the BE-4 rocket engine in addition to a serious accident with the Centaur V upper stage in March this yr.
Because the delays have mounted, ULA has faced increasing pressure from the US Space Force to start flying Vulcan, because it is slated to fly about two dozen national security missions in the following five years. Before it might probably do this, nevertheless, Vulcan must complete two certification flights and supply data to the military. The primary of those is the Astrobotic flight, and the second mission will launch Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spacecraft. During Wednesday’s teleconference, Bruno declined to set a particular goal for that flight, mentioning only that it probably will happen through the first half of next yr.
Going for a lot of missions
Bruno said ULA has sold 70 Vulcan launches, a tally that consists of about one-half military missions and one-half industrial flights. The first customer for the industrial launches is Amazon, which is desirous to begin putting its Project Kuiper broadband Web satellites into low-Earth orbit.
In consequence, ULA is in search of to scale up production of the Vulcan rocket to succeed in a cadence of two launches a month by the tip of 2025. That seems somewhat ambitious and could be asking loads of suppliers, including engine manufacturer Blue Origin. Bruno, nevertheless, said the management challenges of that scaling are being worked on.
“We predict Blue to maintain up with us, and we’re working very, very hard to do this,” he said. “To this point, so good.”