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ULA outlines path for retargeted 1st launch of Vulcan Centaur

The push to get United Launch Alliance’s new rocket off the ground will have to wait for more fixes and testing, but it’s still aiming to launch before the end of the year.

ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno discussed details of the company’s delay in the first flight of Vulcan Centaur, its replacement for its existing stable of Atlas and Delta rockets.

A fireball that destroyed a test version of the upper Centaur V stage and damaged the test stand this past spring at its Alabama test facility put on hold the first launch that had been targeting a May 4 liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. That hardware was fine and even went though a Flight Readiness Test last month, but the test stand issues meant ULA wasn’t going to risk a launch yet.

“We have the root cause. We have the corrective action. The corrective action is low risk, straightforward,” Bruno said.

The mission dubbed Certification-1 is the first of two needed before it can begin a spate of Department of Defense flights. Its primary payload is private company Astrobotic’s lunar lander Peregrine that’s headed to the moon while also carrying the first two test satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper, a planned internet constellation that plans to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink.

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.

He said teams were able to nail down the combination of factors that led to the incident and have already begun the fixes needed to try and squeeze the first launch of the new rocket by the end of the year, with the Dream Chaser mission following within the first few months of 2024.

“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,” he said.

Bruno 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 is 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.

To get to a launch before the end of the year, though, Bruno said the company is doing some shuffling.

The Centaur stage that was at Cape Canaveral has already been shipped back to ULA’s Decatur, Alabama facilities. The Centaur stage that would have been flown on Vulcan’s third flight is now getting the fixes and will be shipped to the Cape.

The second Centaur stage that was planned for the Dream Chaser flight will also get the fixes, but instead of flying on the second launch, it will become a new test article so ULA can finish the required tests specifically to allow for the first two flights, which it will be able to do at a second test stand ULA was using in Alabama.

Bruno said it really comes 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.

ULA blasts off for 1st launch of 2023 on historic Delta IV Heavy mission

The company has just one Delta IV Heavy rocket left and less than 20 Atlas V rockets, all of which have been booked for flight.

The Vulcan delay as well as a delay on the planned crewed launch of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner on an Atlas V, meant ULA so far has had only one launch for the year, which was the penultimate Delta IV Heavy launch last month on a mission for the National Reconnaissance Office.

Meanwhile, SpaceX has already flown 32 missions from the Space Coast and 45 including launches from California.

Once it jumps the hurdles facing Vulcan, though, ULA officials have said the coming years could see it upping its pace to about one launch every two weeks.

Bruno said ULA has several rockets under construction already so it will be prepared.

“We’ve already got the assets nearly built,” he said. “There are many more assets by the way. We never stopped a line on Centaur through all of this. You know I talked about vehicles 1, 2, 3 and 4. There’s another three behind that in the factory moving along at pace right now. And that will allow us to fly before the end of the year.”