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After delays, ULA lights up Vulcan Centaur rocket for 1st time at Cape Canaveral

United Launch Alliance rolled its new Vulcan Centaur rocket back to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station for the much-delayed Flight Readiness Firing test Wednesday.

Bad weather on the Space Coast forced mission managers to delay the hot fire of the engines about three hours later than planned before finally lighting up the launch pad at 9:05 p.m.

“A whole range of emotions, obviously. Super excited. Relieved, I’ll be honest. Very gratifying,” said ULA’s vice president of Vulcan development Mark Peller after the test. “A lot of hard work by the whole team — many, many years of work to get us to where we are here today.”

The test aimed to validate the fully integrated first and second stages of ULA’s new rocket by running through a launch timeline, propellant load and countdown culminating with the ignition of its two BE-4 engines made by Blue Origin for about six seconds producing close to 1 million pounds of thrust while clamped down in place so it didn’t lift off of the pad.

“It’s one of the last significant milestones on the path to launch so it’s tremendously gratifying,” Peller said. “It’s one of those things until you actually see it, it’s hard to actually envision. You’re sitting there, looking at that hardware — in some cases for years — stationary. And while it wasn’t lifting off, to see it actually functioning, with the engines firing and all the systems working together is just — it’s terribly exciting.”

Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos chimed in with his congratulations after the hot fire to ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno.

“Nothing sweeter in rocketry than the word nominal. Congrats to you, Tory, and the whole team!” he posted on Twitter

“Thanks. Loved that BE4 blue fire,” Bruno replied.

‍🔥‍ Let's relive that beautiful #VulcanRocket Flight Readiness Firing! #CountdowntoVulcan 🔥‍ pic.twitter.com/WqPe3jbpiW

— ULA (@ulalaunch) June 8, 2023

The FRF was called off two weeks ago when teams saw a delayed response from the booster engine ignition system used to power up the engines. So ULA rolled it back to the its Vertical Integration Facility at the Cape to understand the issue further. ULA sent the rocket back to the pad Tuesday.

The hardware parked at Space Launch Complex 41 is the same rocket that ULA plans on using for the its first-ever flight dubbed Certification-1.

Bruno indicated last month that the launch won’t happen until at least July. He said that the launch is dependent on completion of Wednesday’s firing test as well as the completion of an investigation after a destructive incident in March during a test. That incident featured a fireball that did some damage on a test article for the rocket’s Centaur stage as well as the company’s test stand at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

The replacement for ULA’s Atlas and Delta IV Heavy rockets have been a long time coming. Plans to fly as early as 2021 kept getting pushed because of engine delivery delays from Blue Origin as well as COVID-19 pandemic slowdowns and ULA’s own rocket manufacturing.

All seemed to be going well toward a May 4 launch this year, though, before the test stand mishap, although all of Certification-1’s payloads also have yet to make their way to the Space Coast for its eventual flight.

Certification-1’s primary payload is the Astrobotic Peregrine lunar lander on what would be the first of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) missions to the moon. Vulcan is also flying up the first two of Amazon’s planned Project Kuiper constellation of satellites, as well as the ashes of more than 150 people including “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry and actor James Doohan, who played “Scotty” on the TV series and movies.

This debut mission is the first of two required before it can move forward with several Department of Defense flights. The second flight will send up Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spacecraft looking to get the OK to join SpaceX and Northrop Grumman for NASA’s cargo delivery options to the International Space Station.

ULA has yet to fly any rocket in 2023, with the second-to-last ever Delta IV Heavy flight slated to launch from Cape Canaveral no earlier than June 21. A planned Atlas V launch of Boeing’s CST-100 on its first-ever crewed flight was recently delayed again from a planned July liftoff with no replacement date announced.

Meanwhile, SpaceX continues to perform the lion’s share of launches from the Space Coast having flown 27 of the 28 orbital rockets so far with the only other coming from Relativity Space.

ULA’s launch docket, though, is big in the coming years if it can get its Vulcan Centaur up and running. Amazon signed contracts with ULA, Blue Origin and Arianespace to fly up to 83 launches in order to build out its Project Kuiper constellation by 2028. Vulcan is tapped to have 38 of those in addition to nine Atlas V launches already planned, so ULA will be responsible for launching more than half of the planned 3,236 internet satellites.

A lot of that is requisite of Blue Origin building out enough BE-4 engines for the one-time use rockets while also needing to supply its own in-development New Glenn rockets that use seven BE-4’s each. Each Vulcan, though, only takes two of those while the upper stage uses two Aerojet Rocketdyne RL10C engines similar to what’s used on an Atlas V. RL10s are built in that company’s West Palm Beach manufacturing facility.