ULA eyes up Christmas Eve to launch its first Vulcan rocket

After long delays due to engines and the rocket’s Centaur upper stage, ULA finally has given a launch date for when it thinks it can launch its new Vulcan rocket. In an interview with CNBC, ULA CEO Tory Bruno shared the date and a lot of other company updates we’ll expand upon in future articles.

Vulcan for Christmas

Tory Bruno, CEO of United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, announced in a CNBC interview that they are targeting December 24 for Vulcan’s inaugural launch. Vulcan was initially suppose to launch this summer but the company ran into trouble with the Centaur V upper stage on a test stand that forced the company to ship the flight hardware back to Decatur.

Vulcan is ULA’s next generation rocket and will replace both the company’s historic Delta and Atlas rockets that have heritage dating back to the 50s and 60s. Vulcan is suppose to be more cost efficient and competitive to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 even though it doesn’t take advantage of any reusability, for now.

Flying inside Vulcan’s payload faring will be Astrobotic’s first lunar lander and a memorial mission from Celestis. Because of mission requirements for Astorbotic’s Peregrine lander’s journey to the Moon, ULA will only have a three day window to launch. So ULA can launch on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and the day after Christmas. If for whatever reason ULA can’t launch during those three days, the next launch window will be in January.

Bruno joked about the line up of dates by saying his family would be traveling down to spend Christmas in Cocoa.

There are still some possibilities that the rocket might not be ready come December as there are still qualification tests and final assembly of the modified Centaur V slated for November. If there are any delays in getting those tests done or transporting it over to the Cape from Alabama, that would delay the launch again.

However, at least we have a pretty solid launch date this time compared to what we had in the past.

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Vulcan’s long road to launch

Vulcan has had some rough roads getting to this point. Development of Vulcan, or at the idea of the rocket, has been underway since the early days of the company. However, it was spring boarded in 2014 when Russia’s annexation of Crimea began to deteriorate relations between Russia and the US. This brought concerns over the US reliance on rockets powered by Russian engines.

To remove ULA’s reliance on foreign rocket engines the company partnered with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to use its BE-4 methane powered rocket engines. This was the start of troubles with the rocket. Delays in Blue Origin’s struggle to design a rocket that meet ULA’s standards brought concerns in the company’s future, however, those have sense been resolved.

The most recent delay was with Vulcan’s upper stage, the Centaur V. An upgrade to the Centaur stage currently flying on the Atlas V, it suffered an anomaly during a test firing at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama this spring. This came after the first flight ready Centaur V arrived at the Cape and was assembled on its booster for a potential summer launch.

Now ULA gets to launch its first of two certification flights for the Space Force. The company needs to flights under its belt before Vulcan can begin to receive flight contracts under the NSSL program.

If the Cert-1 mission with Astrobotic slips into next year, that means that more delay before ULA can get paid for those launches.