United Launch Alliance (ULA) has received government and commercial orders worth billions of dollars for 70 Vulcan rockets, ULA CEO Tory Bruno said on Nov. 15.
ULA is a partnership between Lockheed Martin
[LMT] and Boeing [BA].
“We have a backlog of 70 Vulcan launches,” Bruno told journalists in a phone question and answer session. “It’s kind of unprecedented in the launch business to have a backlog that large but also to have a backlog that large before the first flight.”
The first Vulcan launch is scheduled for Dec. 24 from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The rocket will carry two payloads–the first Peregrine Lunar Lander–Peregrine Mission One (PM1)–for Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology‘s and NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative and Texas-based Celestis, Inc.’s deep space Voyager mission, the Enterprise Flight, an offshoot of the company’s business taking cremated remains to space upon the paid requests of family members.
ULA’s backlog of 70 Vulcan rockets is a “pretty even” split between government and commercial launches, Bruno said.
That balance “is good for the government, and it’s good for the commercial customer…and it’s good for us because I think it’s a little bit healthier to have a mix like that,” he said. “If one customer is launching more often in a certain quarter, there’s a fair chance the other one might be less so it also balances out the load, not just at the factory but at the launch site.”
The first Vulcan government mission is to be USSF-106 for the U.S. Space Force next summer. SpaceX and ULA are the two providers of the Department of the Air Force’s National Security Space Launch (NSSL). Last month, Space Force’s Space Systems Command at Los Angeles AFB, Calif., said that it had assigned 11 NSSL launches to ULA and 10 to SpaceX for NSSL Phase 2—the fifth and final assignments for that phase (Defense Daily, Oct. 31).
Bruno said on Nov. 15 that he has worked on more than 30 development efforts in his aerospace career, including hit-to-kill interceptors and directed energy technology, and that Vulcan is one of the “more orderly and well-executed” of those programs.
The launch date for the first Vulcan was May 4, but the rocket’s Centaur V upper stage had a hydrogen leak and exploded on March 29 at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama–an event that set back the launch timeline (Defense Daily, July 13).
Bruno has said that the crack in the upper stage resulted from load intensification on a lower strength, laser-soldered weld.
“The nature of the leak was not in any way a technology challenge,” he said on Nov. 15, “It was relatively straightforward to fix it. We fixed it. We have retested it. That was all complete weeks and weeks ago before we shipped the [Centaur V upper] stage that’s now down at Cape Canaveral.”
Various factors are behind the projected nearly 7-month delay in Vulcan’s first launch, Bruno said. After the March 29 explosion of the Centaur V upper stage on the test stand at Marshall, it took weeks to “boil off” the Centaur V’s 100,000 pounds of liquid nitrogen left on the ground, and the investigation of the leak took another several months, he said.
“We had to build a new [Centaur V test] asset from scratch–the pacing item to get where we are today,” Bruno said.
In addition, customary checkout testing of rocket electrical systems and a “wet dress rehearsal” that stops just shy of launch are more detailed and time-consuming on a first launch, he said.