United Launch Alliance is preparing for its final planned test flight with its new Vulcan rocket in the pre-dawn hours of Friday morning. The mission, dubbed Cert-2, is the second of two missions needed before ULA can begin launching U.S. national security payloads on Vulcan.
Liftoff of the Vulcan rocket from pad 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station is set for the beginning of a three-hour window at 6 a.m. EDT (1000 UTC). The weather forecast suggests an 80 percent chance of favorable conditions at liftoff.
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about an hour prior to liftoff.
Vulcan is designed to replace ULA’s Delta 4 rockets, which retired earlier this year, and Atlas 5 rockets. There are 15 Atlas 5 flights remaining, split between Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite internet constellation (eight launches), Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft (six launches) and Viasat’s ViaSat-3 (one launch).
ULA’s newest rocket, which first launched in January with Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander, already has a sizeable backlog. It was awarded 25 missions as part of the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 contract, with a total value of nearly $4.5 billion, 38 Kuiper missions for Amazon and six flights for Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spaceplane.
The Cert-2 Vulcan rocket will launch in a VC2S configuration, meaning it will use two solid rocket boosters from Northrop Grumman and a standard payload fairing, which measures 15.5 m (51 ft) in length and is 5.4 m (17.7 ft) in diameter.
During a prelaunch press briefing on Wednesday, ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno noted that they’re following up on a “very, very successful” Cert-1 launch back in January and said he and his team feel good about their prospects this time around as well.
“[The mission] has literally one primary objective, which is to go fly a second time and have another success,” Bruno said. “So now, we have two data points and then, upon the government’s review of the data that confirms all that, you’re certified and then you’re ready to fly national security.”
Originally, the Cert-2 mission was going to be the inaugural launch of Dream Chaser, which would have made its first trip to the International Space Station. However, because the spaceplane wasn’t ready in time for the Cert-2 mission, ULA opted to move them later in their manifest, likely sometime in 2025.
Bruno said they are still “really excited about that mission” and they’re looking forward to flying Dream Chaser. That said, because they need to move forward and begin launching national security payloads for the U.S. Space Force and eventually the National Reconnaissance Office.
“We waited as long as we could to give them every chance and they just needed a little bit more time,” Bruno said. “In fact, we had other customers that wanted to be on Cert-2, if we weren’t going to be able to fly Dream Chaser, but we waited so long that we couldn’t really get those integrated in time either. That’s how interested we were in the Dream Chaser mission and how much we believe in their vehicle, which by the way, means that ULA is paying for this Cert-2 flight.
“There is no paying customer. This is all on us, which is also why we wanted to get some experiments on there and get as much utility out of it as we could.”
Bruno declined to specify exactly how much money ULA is spending on the Cert-2 mission, but broadly described it as “high double digits… high tens of millions of dollars.”
Centaur demonstrations
With no customer onboard, ULA is flying an inert payload, otherwise described as a mass simulator. In essence, it’s a fixture that will remain attached to the 38.5-foot-long (11.7 m) Centaur 5 upper stage following stage separation.
Originally, it was created as a backup in case Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic and its Peregrine lunar lander weren’t ready in time to fly on the Cert-1 mission. During the mission, some instrumentation connected to the mass simulator will be used to gather data about the Centaur 5’s performance and capabilities.
“They’re confirming analytical models about how these strategies and technologies will actually work,” Bruno said. “In some cases, we’ve already been able to anchor models with experiments and demonstrations on the ground, but this this allows us to do that in microgravity.”
Bruno said some of the data being gathered on this mission is related to the maneuvers conducted by the upper stage as well.
“Those maneuvers are helping us with the thermal load that comes in and tries to boil off our propellants. But some of the maneuvers are also intended to reduce the use of consumable things, like the propellants we talked about, like hydrazine,” Bruno said. “Their primary objective is to make those things last longer, last as long as the propellants, the main propellants would last.
“In doing so, they are generally more efficient, which means that the stage may weigh less and have more mass-to-orbit capability. So, you’re getting sort of the side effect of not only having the thing last longer, but on a nominal duration mission, being able to take a larger payload to any given orbit.”
Following the conclusion of these experiments and maneuvers, the Centaur 5 will be sent to what’s called a heliocentric disposal orbit with a final burn putting it on a hyperbolic trajectory.
Bruno said another goal with these tests is to begin pushing the outer limits of how long the upper stage will be able to operate in space. He said their closest goal to now is achieving a life of 12 hours.
“We’re going to go to days and then we’re going to go to weeks and then we think it’s possible to take this to months and that’s a game changer,” Bruno said. “You know, the average upper stage is good for about an hour. You can add a bunch of stuff to it to get five or six hours out of it.”
Making the business case for Vulcan
There are many interested groups who are tracking the progress of the Vulcan rocket. In addition to the Department of Defense and NASA, there are also commercial customers, like Amazon and its Project Kuiper satellite internet constellation, that are looking to Vulcan for a ride to space.
Following the certification of the rocket, ULA aims to launch two more Vulcan missions in 2024: USSF-106 and USSF-87. Bruno said the rocket for USSF-106 is complete and ready to go and that his team is finishing work on the upper stage for the USSF-87 mission now.
“Everything is built and down at the Cape. So if the satellites are ready, I’m ready, knock on wood, after my very successful Cert mission on Friday, Bruno said.
Those will be the final missions for ULA in 2024, if all goes according to plan. Previously Amazon said they were aiming to launch their first, full production batch of Kuiper satellites on an Atlas 5 rocket in Q4 of 2024, but Bruno said that’s now looking more like early 2025, due to the schedule of the national security missions.
Looking to 2025, Bruno said they aim to launch up to 20 missions, which would be a record for ULA. Those would be split “roughly” 50-50 between Vulcan and Atlas missions.
“I’m only giving it to you roughly because I got other commercial customers than the one maybe you know about,” Bruno said. “It’s their purview to announce their mission, so I don’t want to give you a precise count, but roughly half and half of the 20 are Atlas versus Vulcan.”
In a social media post on Thursday, Bruno noted that the previous peak number of launches for ULA was 16. He added that they launched fewer times in recent years due to a division of government launches between ULA and SpaceX.
Our previous peak was 16. Did 14 the year I arrived. All that with 1 VIF / 1 Track. It’s been lower the last few of years because we split the USG market competitively with SX. We’ve nearly finished all the factory expansions and will have 2 VIFs. Hard work, but not a stretch
— Tory Bruno (@torybruno) October 3, 2024
The proposed ramp up in cadence for ULA will be supported by what they call a second lane out at Space Launch Complex 41 (SLC-41) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The original Vertical Integration Facility will become VIF-G, which will support primarily government missions.
Meanwhile, the new VIF, which is currently under modification and outfitting, will become VIF-2 or VIF-C for commercial missions. Bruno said construction is going well and the expect to have it operational somewhere around the end of Q1 or beginning of Q2 in 2025.
Over at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, ULA is continuing work to convert Space Launch Complex 3 (SLC-3) from an Atlas to a Vulcan-only pad, which Bruno described as being “a little ahead of schedule.”
“I expect to have that done either late Q1 or very early Q2,” Bruno said. “By the way, that comes with major upgrades to the road coming up from the wharf at the base and onto the main facility, which will be used by everybody.
“So, that infrastructure doesn’t just benefit ULA, but it benefits all the users down there at Vandenberg.”
All told, Bruno said ULA spent more than a billion dollars across all of their various infrastructure projects to support the transition to Vulcan and the planned ramp up of launch cadence, which is projected to be around 25 launches annually.
He also gave a ballpark figure for what it cost to develop the Vulcan rocket itself over the past near decade.
“The rule of thumb is it costs you somewhere between $5 and $7 billion. Vulcan is not outside the rule of thumb,” Bruno said. “So, there was private investment in the development of Vulcan of that order of magnitude.”
The Cert-2 flight will also mark the second time that Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines will propel a rocket into space. The company will use seven of them in a slightly different configuration during the inaugural launch of the New Glenn rocket, which is targeting launch in November.
Blue Origin supplied ULA with all the BE-4s needed to launch the remaining Vulcan rockets in 2024 before it pivoted to New Glenn. Bruno said now that the first New Glenn rocket is outfitted with its engines, the production lane will pivot back to ULA.
“Within a few weeks, my deliveries will resume again and they’ll begin delivering engines to me this year that I need for next year,” Bruno said.
