A great example of this from this week is United Launch Alliance’s Cert-2 mission.
If you’re in the space world, hearing CEO Torey Bruno announce that ULA will bite the bullet and fly Cert-2 without a customer payload is a wild announcement. After all, aren’t rockets expensive? Don’t rockets often wait months or even years for a spacecraft to be ready for launch? Why are you sending? A $100 million empty Vulcan rocket into orbit for no one to pay for, especially if ULA has sold over 70 launches to customers?
The simple answer is that Cert-2 has a client: the Pentagon. But let’s unpack that.
The tasks of national security are: The most profitable launch contracts, amounting to billions of dollars annually in missile orders. Some are low-cost experimental missions, but the vast majority are expensive, top-secret satellites that the Pentagon doesn’t want to let anyone fly. Enter the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program.
ULA and SpaceX are already in the NSSL program, but any time they bring a new rocket to market, the Space Force requires that specific order. The missile was successfully launched before being certified for the NSSL mission. Hence the name of the second Vulcan mission, Cert-2. It was first launched in January.Which was the first step towards obtaining the certificate.
“What the Space Force is looking to see with Cert-2 is another successful flight just like Cert-1,” Bruno said during a news conference Wednesday.
After Cert-2, ULA will send the Space Force “gigabytes of data for all the hardware on every part of the rocket,” Bruno said, and assuming they “don’t find any surprises,” Vulcan will be ready to start launching NSSL missions.
ULA had planned to launch Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser cargo plane aboard Cert-2, but Bruno said the latter company’s CEO Tom Weiss “felt it was a risk of a very large timeline against my needs.” Dream Chaser will be sidelined, replaced by an “inert payload,” also known as a “mass simulator” (imagine a big block of concrete and metal), so Cert-2 can launch by September.
Why the rush?
Well, the Pentagon has already purchased a full complement of Vulcan launches, and expects to fly two of those missions — USSF-106 and USSF-87 — before the end of the year. Indeed, Frank Calvelli, the Air Force’s top brass, lobbied Bruno and the ULA Message sent last month To the rocket company’s owners, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, they expressed concern “due to Vulcan delays.” As announced by the Air Force ULA finedFor an undisclosed amount due to Vulcan delays.
One question mark that had hung over the next three Vulcan missions has been largely settled at least: Blue Origin’s ability to provide the BE-4 engines for the rockets. The company has delivered to ULA the six engines needed for the three launches, and Bruno said he has “much more confidence” in that relationship. That wasn’t the case a year ago, Bruno said, noting that his company had “a lot of concern” about securing the engines ULA needed. That was when Blue Origin had a file BE-4 engine explodes during acceptance testing – Engine that was intended for the launch of Cert-2.
Delivering the BE-4 engines on time is even more important next year, as Bruno expects ULA to launch 20 times in 2025, half on Atlas V rockets and half on Vulcan rockets. The company has a total of 16 Atlas V rockets left to launch before they are all on Vulcan.
The Pentagon is ULA’s most important client. So, while the Army may not pay for Cert-2 directly, the backlog of NSSL orders is why ULA is willing to pay out of its own pocket to get the job started.
Oh, and there’s another open question about The long-rumoured ULA saleI thought, as did others, that Vulcan’s successful debut earlier this year would seal the deal. In addition to Jeff Bezos A set of stock sales Earlier this year he made Blue Origin look like a likely winner. I’m speculating, but whoever wants to buy ULA might wait until after Cert-2 — or perhaps a more friendly FTC if there’s a change in the White House next November.
