ULA chief on the Vulcan rocket: “The path to flight one is clear”

During a media roundtable on Wednesday afternoon, the chief executive of United Launch Alliance, Tory Bruno, said, “The path to flight one is clear" for Vulcan. The last major piece of hardware for the rocket, the Centaur V upper stage, arrived at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Monday. All of the qualification testing necessary for the first flight, including for the upper stage, is complete.

Bruno said United Launch Alliance, or ULA, has some margin in its schedule as it works toward a launch at 1:49 am ET on Christmas Eve. If the weather is poor, the company also has launch opportunities on December 25 and 26 before the closure of the launch window this year. The “Certification 1” mission would then have another launch opportunity during the first half of January.

Bruno said ULA has sold 70 Vulcan launches, a tally that consists of about one-half military missions and one-half commercial flights. The primary customer for the commercial launches is Amazon, which is eager to begin putting its Project Kuiper broadband Internet satellites into low-Earth orbit.

As a result, ULA is seeking to scale up production of the Vulcan rocket to reach a cadence of two launches a month by the end of 2025. That seems rather ambitious and might be asking a lot of suppliers, including engine manufacturer Blue Origin. Bruno, however, said the management challenges of that scaling are being worked on.

“We are expecting Blue to keep up with us, and we’re working very, very hard to do that,” he said. “So far, so good.”