CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—Right out of the gate, United Launch Alliance's new Vulcan rocket chased perfection.
The Vulcan launcher hit its marks after lifting off from Florida's Space Coast for the first time early Monday, successfully deploying a commercial robotic lander on a journey to the Moon and keeping ULA's unblemished success record intact.
"Yeehaw! I am so thrilled, I can’t tell you how much!" exclaimed Tory Bruno, ULA's president and CEO, shortly after Vulcan's departure from Cape Canaveral. "I am so proud of this team. Oh my gosh, this has been years of hard work. So far, this has been an absolutely beautiful mission."
This was a pivotal moment for ULA, a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The Vulcan rocket will replace ULA's mainstay rockets, the Atlas V and Delta IV, with lineages dating back to the dawn of the Space Age. ULA has contracts for more than 70 Vulcan missions in its backlog, primarily for the US military and Amazon's Project Kuiper broadband network.
The Vulcan rocket lived up to the moment Monday. It took nearly a decade for ULA to develop it, some four years longer than anticipated, but the first flight took off at the opening of the launch window on the first launch attempt.
Standing 202 feet (61.6 meters) tall, the Vulcan rocket ignited its two BE-4 main engines in the final seconds of a smooth countdown. A few moments later, two strap-on solid rocket boosters flashed to life to propel the Vulcan rocket off its launch pad at 2:18 am EST (07:18 UTC).
On the money
The BE-4 engines and solid-fueled boosters combined to generate more than 2 million pounds of thrust, vaulting Vulcan off the launch pad and through a thin cloud layer. A little over a minute after launch, Vulcan accelerated faster than the speed of sound, then jettisoned its strap-on boosters to fall into the Atlantic Ocean.
Then it was all BE-4. Each of these engines can produce more than a half-million pounds of thrust, consuming a mixture of liquified natural gas—essentially methane—and liquid oxygen. They are built by Blue Origin, the space company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos. This was the first time BE-4s have flown on a rocket.
Rob Gagnon, ULA's telemetry commentator, calmly called out mission milestones. "BE-4s continue to operate nominally... Vehicle is continuing to fly down the center of the range track, everything looking good... Nice and smooth operation of the booster."
The BE-4s fired for five minutes, then shut down to allow Vulcan's first stage booster to fall away from the rocket's hydrogen-fueled Centaur upper stage. Two RL10 engines ignited to continue the push into orbit, then switched off as the upper stage coasted over the Atlantic and Africa. A restart of the Centaur upper stage 43 minutes into the flight gave the rocket enough velocity to send Astrobotic's Peregrine lunar lander toward the Moon.
The nearly 1.5-ton spacecraft separated from Vulcan's Centaur upper stage around 50 minutes after liftoff. "We have spacecraft separation, right on time," Gagnon announced.
With Astrobotic's lander deployed, a third engine firing on the Centaur upper stage moved the rocket off its Moon-bound trajectory and onto a course into heliocentric orbit. “We have now achieved Earth escape," Gagnon said.
The spent rocket stage will become a human-made artificial satellite of the Sun. A plate on the side of the Centaur upper stage contains small capsules holding the cremated remains of more than 200 people, a "memorial spaceflight" arranged by a Houston-based private company named Celestis.
Vulcan's apparently flawless debut is fantastic news for United Launch Alliance. Mark Peller, ULA's vice president of major development, told reporters last week that the rocket represents "the future of our company."
“Vulcan’s inaugural launch ushers in a new, innovative capability to meet the ever-growing requirements of space launch,” Bruno said in a statement. “Vulcan will provide high performance and affordability while continuing to deliver our superior reliability and orbital precision for all our customers across the national security, civil, and commercial markets.
ULA revealed the Vulcan rocket in 2015 as an answer to competition from SpaceX. At the time, SpaceX had racked up a series of successful Falcon 9 launches at a significantly lower cost per flight than ULA's Atlas V and Delta IV rockets. This was before SpaceX recovered and reused any Falcon 9 boosters, an achievement that unlocked even lower costs and a higher flight rate.
Until then, ULA enjoyed unfettered access to a lucrative market for launching US military satellites. The Atlas V and Delta IV were the only rockets certified by the Pentagon to haul critical and costly national security payloads into orbit. SpaceX sued the Air Force after being shut out of competition for military launch contracts, and after mediation, it won a concession that allowed the Falcon 9 rocket to become certified to launch these top-priority national security satellites. Like ULA, SpaceX has a perfect launch success record since the military certified the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy.
Now, SpaceX and ULA share the load for launching military space missions. The Pentagon wants to have two independent launch providers to ensure its satellites always have a ride to orbit.
Since ULA announced the Vulcan program, it has lost its dominant position in the US launch market. SpaceX now occupies that position after launching nearly 100 rockets last year; ULA launched three.
But ULA wants to ramp up the cadence of Vulcan launches to twice per month. It will need to at least come close to this launch rate to meet the demands of the military and Amazon, which plans to deploy more than 3,000 satellites in the next few years, mostly on Vulcan flights. ULA also bills the Vulcan rocket design as optimized for demanding launch profiles to unique high-altitude orbits favored by the military.
In the most recent batch of launch orders awarded by the Space Force, ULA won 26 contracts worth $3.1 billion. All but one of these will fly on Vulcan rockets (the other will launch on an Atlas V). SpaceX nabbed 22 contracts with a value of $2.5 billion, covering missions launching Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.
Monday's launch was the first of two certification flights before the Space Force approves Vulcan to launch national security payloads. A second Vulcan certification flight is slated to haul Sierra Space's Dream Chaser spaceplane on a resupply mission to the International Space Station. ULA officials said last week that this launch could happen as soon as April, but the schedule will probably hinge on the readiness of Sierra Space's first Dream Chaser spacecraft.
This would set up the first Vulcan launch with a Space Force mission as soon as this summer, according to ULA. Then there's the challenge of reaching a steady launch cadence to meet hearty customer demand. ULA also plans to start recovering and reusing BE-4 engines in the next few years.
Vulcan's debut also comes as ULA's parent companies have put it up for sale. There's some speculation that a sale could be announced after Vulcan's first flight.
In his remarks last week, Peller said the Vulcan rocket sets up ULA "for a very bright, prosperous future for many, many years to come." Bruno told Bloomberg News in October that ULA's transition to the Vulcan rocket, and the phasing out of its more expensive legacy launchers, positions the company well for an acquisition.
"You’re not buying a Victorian with bad plumbing," Bruno said at the time. "It’s all been done. You’re coming in at the end of the remodel, so you can focus on your future."
Peller's comments last week seemed to echo Bruno's thoughts. Vulcan "has proven to already be an extremely competitive product in the marketplace, having an order book of over 70 missions before first flight, which is really unheard of," he said. "So it is the future of our company, and we're off to a great start on a really solid trajectory with Vulcan.”
To the Moon
The launch early Monday morning did more than open a new chapter in the history of ULA. It also set into motion Astrobotic's historic attempt to become the first commercial company to make a controlled landing on the Moon.
Astrobotic's Peregrine lander, measuring roughly 6.2 feet (1.9 meters) tall, carries 20 payloads. Five of these payloads come from NASA, which is paying Astrobotic around $108 million for the lunar delivery. This is the first mission to launch under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which NASA set up in 2018 to purchase commercial transportation services to the Moon for scientific instruments and experiments. The CLPS missions are precursors to future astronaut landings on the Moon with NASA's Artemis program.
This is also the first space mission for Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh-based company founded in 2007. Another company, Intuitive Machines, is preparing to launch its first lunar lander mission as soon as next month, also with NASA participation.
NASA's payload complement on Astrobotic's Peregrine lander includes a radiation sensor, spectrometers, and a laser retroreflector array. The mission also includes a small lunar rover developed at Carnegie Mellon University and five tiny robots—each less than a tenth of a pound—from the Mexican Space Agency that will deploy onto the lunar surface. Some of Astrobotic's customers are sending commemorative plaques and mementos to the Moon.
Then there are Celestis and Elysium Space. These two companies gathered human ashes from families paying to send the remains of their loved ones for an eternal stay on the lunar surface. Celestis says it has the cremated remains or DNA of 66 people onboard Astrobotic's lander. This is a separate set of remains from those that remained attached to the Centaur upper stage heading into interplanetary space.
The presence of human remains on the Moon-bound lander prompted protests from the Navajo Nation, which said the act of depositing ashes on the lunar surface amounts to desecration of the Moon, a body held sacred by the Navajo people.
Following Monday's launch, the Vulcan rocket released Astrobotic's Peregrine spacecraft into a highly elliptical orbit stretching more than 200,000 miles from Earth. Astrobotic said its ground controllers in Pittsburgh established contact with the spacecraft through a network of NASA antennas.
Peregrine will complete one full lap around Earth before intercepting the Moon at the high point, or apogee, of its second orbit. This will happen later this month when Astrobotic will command the spacecraft to fire its engines and slip into lunar orbit. Additional orbit adjustments will set up the Peregrine lander for a final descent to the Moon on February 23.
Assuming it successfully reaches the surface, Peregrine will operate on the Moon for about 10 days until the Sun sets below the horizon at the landing site. At that point, temperatures will plummet and darkness will overtake the lander, robbing it of solar energy and almost certainly bringing the mission to an end.
