With 1st Vulcan Centaur launch on tap, ULA prepares for busy 2024

United Launch Alliance has its missing rocket piece in hand at Cape Canaveral and all systems are go for a Christmas Eve launch to mark the debut of its Vulcan Centaur rocket.

A new Centaur upper stage arrived by barge to the Space Coast on Monday, a replacement for the stage ULA originally planned to fly on the Certification-1 mission this past May. That initial flight, already delayed for nearly two years, was again put on hold after an issue with a test version of the Centaur stage was destroyed amid a massive fireball in the spring, requiring design changes to ensure a repeat didn’t happen during actual liftoff.

“The path to flight 1 is clear,” said ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno. “All we need to do is integrate the stage onto the vehicle. We do all kinds of system testing anytime we touch it, so we’ll have to pass all of that, get through the [wet dress rehearsal] and then integrate the payload, and off to space,”

ULA has been champing at the bit to get this debut launch off the ground with its primary payload of Astrobotic Technology’s Peregrine lunar lander, part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services missions. The lander traveled from Astrobotic’s headquarters in Pittsburgh arriving to the Space Coast on Oct. 31.

Certification-1 also is carrying partial human remains or DNA for Celestis Inc.’s Enterprise Flight, including “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry and actors James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols and DeForest Kelley, all to be installed on the Centaur stage that will head out for a permanent home in deep space.

“So that memorial orbits the sun essentially until the end of time for all practical purposes,” Bruno said.

Certification-1 has a three-day window from Dec. 24-26 with early morning target liftoff times because of the needs of the lunar lander’s target on the moon. If it misses the December dates, Bruno said ULA was working with NASA to nail down options in the first half of January.

The mission is the first of two ULA has to complete before it would be allowed to fly missions for the Department of Defense, and ULA had originally been targeting three such missions in 2023 before the delay.

It’s also the first of 70 missions stretching out five years for Vulcan with Bruno only willing to say the contracts were worth “billions.”

“It’s a substantial backlog, kind of in a way unprecedented in the launch business to have a backlog that large, but also to have a backlog that large before the first flight,” he said.

The second flight, Certification-2, is targeting either the first or second quarter of 2024, Bruno said, but he deferred to its customer Sierra Space to announce a more specific target date. That mission will be to fly the Dream Chaser spacecraft, an uncrewed cargo space plane that will dock with the International Space Station before returning for a landing back at Kennedy Space Center like the space shuttle used to do.

Vulcan is the replacement rocket for ULA’s stable of Atlas V and Delta IV rockets, with only one Delta IV left to fly and 17 Atlas V’s.

ULA will have to juggle several Atlas launches in 2024 with its Vulcan launches as they use the same launch pad.

And Vulcan launches are dependent on a steady supply of the new American-made engines for the first stage, Blue Origin’s BE-4’s, which have had their own tortuous development run partially blamed on COVID that contributed to Vulcan missing its original target to launch in 2021.

But more than two years later, Bruno said the path to success isn’t facing any more hurdles.

“There are things you’ve got to get through in the new rocket, like developments, right? Which we’ve now just about finished up, and then all of, everybody, your supply chain, yourself, everybody has to start at the first one. And then you ramp up to a production rate,” Bruno said.

He recently toured Blue Origin’s BE-4 factory in Huntsville, Alabama, and expects the supply to keep up with demand.

“It’s fair to characterize it as probably the largest, most modern rocket engine factory now in existence,” he said. “So they’re just in the process of ramping up the production rate. … The engines are in good shape and they’re going to be delivered in time for us to put on a booster. and be standing by ready to go.”

By 2025, ULA looks to bring on a second integration facility in Cape Canaveral so it can prep two rockets at once while also aiming for Vulcan’s first launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

“As they move through time, the rate is increasing sort of continuously in that factory in Huntsville, and is expected to keep up with us through ’24 and then really be hitting its stride in ’25 as we are hitting our higher rate,” Bruno said. “We’re expecting Blue to keep up with us. They’re working very, very hard to do that. So far, so good.”

The BE-4’s combine with up to six solid rocket boosters that can bring more than 60,000 pounds of payload to low-Earth orbit, an increase over its Atlas and Delta capabilities.

“A new heavy-class space launch vehicle is not introduced every day,” Bruno said. “Generally, that’s those things are a decade or two apart. So it takes a long time … to develop one. And so this is the end of a multiyear-long journey for us. It’s going to bring a new capability to the country, to our customers and to ourselves, so we’re super excited about it.