ULA outlines retargeted Vulcan Centaur launch plan

“We have the root cause. We have the corrective action. The corrective action is low risk, straightforward,”

ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno

The push to get United Launch Alliance’s new rocket off the ground will have to wait for more fixes and testing, but it’s still aiming to launch before the end of the year.

ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno discussed details of the company’s delay in the first flight of Vulcan Centaur, its replacement for its existing stable of Atlas and Delta rockets.

A fireball that destroyed a test version of the upper Centaur V stage and damaged the test stand this past spring at its Alabama test facility put on hold the first launch that had been targeting a May 4 liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

That hardware was fine and even went though a Flight Readiness Test last month, but the test stand issues meant ULA wasn’t going to risk a launch yet.

“We have the root cause. We have the corrective action. The corrective action is low risk, straightforward,” Bruno said.

The mission dubbed Certification-1 is the first of two needed before it can begin a spate of Department of Defense flights. Its primary payload is private company Astrobotic’s lunar lander Peregrine that’s headed to the moon while also carrying the first two test satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper, a planned internet constellation that plans to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink.

A second certification mission aims to fly Sierra Space’s uncrewed Dream Chaser spacecraft on its first trip to space.

Those two flights and what had been a planned third launch for the Space Force before the end of the year were halted while ULA worked through what it has called a “structural test stand anomaly” at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

He said teams were able to nail down the combination of factors that led to the incident and have already begun the fixes needed to try and squeeze the first launch of the new rocket by the end of the year, with the Dream Chaser mission following within the first few months of 2024.

“This very large [40-foot-long, 18-foot diameter] stage tank really is built from very, very thin stainless steel sheets, thinner than a dime,” he said.

Bruno said the pressure loads near the top of the domed Centaur V test machinery married with weaker than predicted welds led to a hydrogen leak that formed a crack so that it found an ignition source in the stand that resulted in the fireball and subsequent damage. The solution is to install a second layer of stainless steel to protect the top of the stage and battle the higher pressures, he said.

“The corrective action is a pretty low-tech thing,” he said.