ULA launches its Vulcan rocket on Oct. 4, 2024. (Screengrab via ULA livestream)
WASHINGTON — United Launch Alliance (ULA) CEO Tory Bruno is positioning the Vulcan Centaur launch vehicle for future national security missions, including sneaking satellites past Chinese watching eyes, even as the company continues to wait for a Space Force decision on whether the rocket can be certified to carry today’s payloads.
Bruno told reporters today that Vulcan already is optimized for “exotic orbits for the government” and could provide services like “directly injecting [a spacecraft] into geosynchronous orbit.”
At the same time, he added, ULA has “a set of investments that are around extending the life of the upper stage, which would allow us to fly different kinds of trajectories…
“There are other things we can do for them [the US government] that are useful in national security, I might even say confounding for Chinese threats in space, that are enabled by a longer lived upper stage.”
Such a fuel-heavy upper stage could be used in rapid, long-range maneuvering to outfox hostile satellites, Bruno explained.
“If I have longer duration, I can go to a different place. If I have longer duration, I can do unusual trajectories that would obfuscate where my destination is, which becomes a challenge for an adversary who wants to surveil or interfere with that spacecraft,” he said. “Then they have to either find it and or position a hostile asset next to it. When they have a plan to do that, it’s a big deal for an adversary because spacecraft can’t carry very much propellant and still have useful payload.”
But before any of that can happen, the Space Force needs to give Vulcan Centaur the thumbs up to carry currently manifested payloads under the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program.
To do that, a launch provider needs to demonstrate two successful flights of its launch vehicle before receiving certification by the service to fly critical NSSL missions. While Vulcan first flight last January passed the certification tests, its second certification flight in October did not.
That flight suffered “an anomaly in one of the two solid rocket motors where we lost the nozzle,” he explained, although the Vulcan nonetheless managed to achieve “a perfect orbital insertion,” Bruno said.
“So, that was all good, but I do prefer that all the parts of my rocket leaders stay attached where they’re supposed to be,” Bruno added.
ULA’s investigation discovered that the problem was due to a manufacturing error, he said.
“We have isolated the root cause appropriate corrective actions, and those were qualified and confirmed in a full-scale static firing in Utah last month. So, we are back in continuing to fabricate hardware and at least initially, screening for what that root cause was, which was a manufacturing defect of one of the internal parts of the nozzle insulator,” Bruno elaborated.
A spokesperson for Northrop Grumman, which supplies the solid rocket motors for the Vulcan Center, declined to comment.
Bruno said that ULA submitted the findings of the investigation to the Space Force about a month ago for review, noting that “typically, it’s not a very long process.”
A spokesperson for Space Systems Command’s Assured Access to Space office told Breaking Defense today that a decision is still pending.
“We have been working with ULA very closely over the last several years to complete NSSL certification of their Vulcan system. The teams have made tremendous progress, and we are close to a decision,” the spokesperson said.
In November, ULA and the Space Force said that the two NSSL program launches manifested on Vulcan for launch last year, USSF-106 and USSF-87, were expected to lift off early this year after having been postponed due to the investigation of the second flight.
A senior Space Force official said in January that the Space Force was “targeting mid-February” for being able to give the all clear to Vulcan, and noted that the service is planning 18 total launches under the current NSSL Phase 2 program: 11 on Vulcan and seven for SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
While a recent report to Congress from the Air Force, first reported by Bloomberg, criticized ULA’s overall performance as “unsatisfactory” and suggested that the Space Force may shift some of its planned Vulcan launches to SpaceX, Bruno punched back that the report was out of date and not accurate even at the time of its writing in January.
“I saw it before it was leaked, and I don’t normally talk about improperly leaked reports, but I’m going to make an exception this time. When that was written it was inaccurate. As we sit here today, it is certainly overtaken by events,” he said.
