ULA has big Vulcan launch plans for 2025

For ULA, 2024 was supposed to be the year of Vulcan. The year it debuted and the year it began flying national security missions. While it debuted, and flew a few times, delays to its certification have pushed that second goal to 2025.

ULA has been developing Vulcan for a decade, since 2014. Vulcan’s goal has been to better compete directly with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets commercially and move away from reliance on Russian-made engines for the Atlas V. While this was long before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the writing was on the wall that engine supplies and support would likely dry up one day.

That came true, as Russia eventually blocked any US companies from purchasing new engines and any support for the engines they have in stock. Tory Bruno, ULA’s CEO, played this perfectly, ensuring it had enough engines and parts for the remainder of the Atlas V’s life. The same cannot be said for Northrop Grumman, whose Antares launch vehicle relied on Russian engines and Ukrainian-made booster components, neither of which it had enough of for more than a couple more launches.

In 2024, Vulcan launched twice. Its debut launch back in January carried Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander to the Moon. While the launch went off without a hitch, the landing ran into problems almost instantly. Vulcan’s second flight took place in October. While it was supposed to carry Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser for a demo flight, it ended up with a mass simulator due to delays.

Vulcan’s second flight was able to reach the designated orbit; however, an anomaly took place on one of the two solid rocket motors during ascent. This has been one of the main delays in getting Vulcan certified by the Space Force. Although, according to Bruno, it won’t require a third certification flight.

The Space Force shared that Vulcan should be certified in the first quarter of 2025. ULA was hoping to be certified and launch two national security missions by the end of this year; without being certified, that makes that impossible. This would put the next Vulcan launch in the spring of next year. That mission is expected to be USSF-106, an experimental GPS satellite.

In total, ULA is planning for as many as 20 Vulcan missions to launch in 2025. Bruno shared in an interview with Breaking Defense that it already has 16 Vulcan rockets stocked up and awaiting launch. USSF-106’s Vulcan is already stacked, minus the payload, in Florida awaiting a go to launch.

With the delay in Vulcan’s next launch, ULA may move an Atlas V mission up to early 2025. The company only has 15 Atlas V rockets left and they are split between Boeing Starliner flights (six) and Amazon Kuiper missions (nine). ULA expects to fly all of those Kuiper missions by the end of 2025 or early 2026.

In total, that would put ULA at 29 launches, the most in the company’s history. Like all launch goals, that number will likely be lower.