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ULA targets Christmas Eve launch for new Vulcan Centaur rocket

United Launch Alliance is looking to get its much-delayed Vulcan Centaur rocket up off the pad before the end of the year loaded with a lunar lander and the ashes of “Star Trek’s” creator and a key actor on the show.

The company announced it was targeting liftoff of the Certification-1 mission for Dec. 24 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 41. Its primary payload will be Astrobotic Technology’s Peregrine lunar lander headed for the moon as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.

Certification-1 also is taking up for Celestis Inc. the ashes of more than 150 people to space, including “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry and actor James Doohan who played Scotty on the TV series on what the company is calling its Enterprise Flight.

The remains will be installed in the upper Centaur stage, which will continue to deep space to achieve an orbit around the sun after Centaur deploys the primary Astrobotic payload.

‘We have a launch date!” Astrobotic posted on its X social feed. The company had been prepping for a launch this past May, which would have made it the first of NASA’s CLPS missions, but with the delay, SpaceX is geared to send up a competitor’s lunar lander, the Intuitive Machines IM-1 mission set for liftoff as early as Nov. 15.

Still, ULA managed to work through a series of issues that delayed liftoff of Vulcan, the replacement for its Atlas and Delta family of rockets. ULA only has one Delta IV Heavy left in its stable, and that will fly next year on a mission for the Department of Defense.

It also has 18 more Atlas V rockets, all of which are spoken for among launches for Amazon’s Project Kuiper, Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner and DOD missions.

The planned May launch of Vulcan Centaur, though, hit a snag after a fireball erupted at an Alabama test stand that destroyed a test version of the rocket’s Centaur stage. At the time, ULA was going through tests to push the envelope for stresses its new rocket might see on launch, and the fire resulted in the need for ULA to come up with solutions to prevent a similar event from happening on a live launch.

The decision was to pull the safe Centaur stage that had already gone through a Flight Readiness Test and was awaiting launch at Cape Canaveral and send it back to the company’s Decatur, Alabama, facilities to get the fixes determined that would avoid a repeat of what happened on the test stand.

Instead of coming back to the Cape, ULA opted to prep the Centaur stage that would have been flown on Vulcan’s third flight to receive the fixes so it can be the replacement upper stage to be stacked atop the first stage that remained on the Space Coast.

Certification-1 is the first of two missions ULA needs to fly before it can begin a spate of Department of Defense flights with the Vulcan Centaur. The original flight planned for May was also going to send up two test satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuipier, but Amazon opted to send those up on an Atlas V rocket earlier this month instead.

“Upon completion of its powered burn and coast phase, the Enterprise Flight will become Enterprise Station – the most distant permanent human repository outpost, and a pathfinder for the continuing human exploration of space,” reads a statement about the flight on Celestis.com.

A second certification mission aims to fly Sierra Space’s uncrewed Dream Chaser spacecraft on its first trip to space.

Those two flights and what had been a planned third launch for the Space Force before the end of the year were halted while ULA worked through what it has called a “structural test stand anomaly” at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno said teams were able to nail down the combination of factors that led to the incident.

“This very large [40-foot-long, 18-foot diameter] stage tank really is built from very, very thin stainless steel sheets, thinner than a dime,” Bruno said last June.

He said the pressure loads near the top of the domed Centaur V test machinery married with weaker than predicted welds led to a hydrogen leak that formed a crack so that it found an ignition source in the stand that resulted in the fireball and subsequent damage.

The solution was to install a second layer of stainless steel to protect the top of the stage and battle the higher pressures, he said.

“The corrective action is a pretty low-tech thing,” he said.

Bruno said it really came down to just a couple of required qualifications for the first two flights, but that more tests will need to be done to sign off on all the extremes that future missions, such as those for the Space Force, might face.

The fireball happened on the 15th qualification test, which was only about 1/3 of the total number of tests needed for a complete fleet certification, Bruno said. So those tests will continue through early 2024 using the fourth Centaur V off the production line while ULA makes its first two flights.

That will pave the way for its first national security missions that Bruno said could happen in the second quarter of 2024.

Vulcan Centaur, which has been in the works since 2014, has faced myriad delays including COVID-19 issues and the arrival of its first two BE-4 engines from provider Blue Origin, which didn’t get them to ULA until late 2022.

Once ULA gets through its certification flights, in addition to the Department of Defense missions, it has 38 planned missions to put up more of Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellites as well as more Dream Chaser missions.

Vulcan Centaur’s two BE-4 engines provide 1.1 million pounds of thrust on their own, but the rocket can be augmented with up to six solid rocket boosters with enough power to bring 60,000 pounds of payload to low-Earth orbit.

If it flies, it would mark ULA’s fourth launch of the year having already launched one Delta IV Heavy and two Atlas V missions. The company is gearing up to handle at least two Vulcan launches a month, though, including the construction of a second rocket integration facility in Cape Canaveral.