Three days at Christmastime will be the final chance for United Launch Alliance to get its new Vulcan rocket off the ground this year, the company's chief executive announced Tuesday.
Still waiting for delivery of an upper stage and a final round of qualification testing following a test mishap earlier this year, Tory Bruno, ULA's CEO, told CNBC on Tuesday that the Vulcan rocket's first demonstration flight is scheduled for launch December 24. There are two backup launch dates available December 25 and 26; otherwise, the launch will have to wait until January.
If the Vulcan rocket's first flight happens on one of these dates, the launch will be at night, Bruno posted on the social media platform X.
There are threats to this schedule, but ULA officials were confident enough in the timeline to publicly disclose the launch date Tuesday. They have also told Astrobotic, which is flying its first commercial Moon cargo lander on the inaugural Vulcan rocket, to ship its spacecraft from the company's Pittsburgh headquarters to Florida in anticipation of a December launch.
"We need to finish building our upper stage and ship it down there (to Cape Canaveral)," Bruno told CNBC. "There's some qualification testing in parallel. Both of those get done in November. The booster is already there ready to go, and the reason it's Christmas Eve is because of science, orbital mechanics.
"If for some reason anything happens, bad weather, there's some delay in shipping the stage, we can move into January, where there's another similar window," Bruno said.
Tight launch windows
There are only a few days each month that the Vulcan rocket can take off. That's not the fault of ULA, but a constraint imposed by its payload. Astrobotic's robotic Peregrine lander will aim for landing at a region on the near side of the Moon known as the Gruithuisen Domes, the location of an ancient eruption of thick lava that solidified into steep rocky mounds.
Astrobotic wants to have good lighting at the landing site when it arrives, allowing the company's solar-powered Peregrine lander to return scientific data from a suite of NASA instruments.
In February, United Launch Alliance—a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin—announced May 4 as the target launch date for the first Vulcan rocket.
But ULA soon scrapped that schedule after a test unit of the Vulcan rocket's Centaur upper stage exploded during a pressure test in Alabama in late March. ULA's launch team at Cape Canaveral, Florida, continued testing the Vulcan's first stage with a brief but flawless firing of its two Blue Origin-built main engines on the launch pad in June. Since then, the Vulcan launch campaign in Florida has been pretty much at a standstill.
Engineers traced the cause of the Centaur explosion to a combination of higher-than-anticipated stress near the top of the liquid hydrogen propellant tank and slightly weaker welding. The upper stage designed for the Vulcan rocket is called the Centaur V. It's a wider, twin-engine version of the Centaur upper stage that has been reliably flying on several types of rockets since the 1960s.
ULA sent the Centaur V upper stage that was already at Cape Canaveral for the first Vulcan launch back to the company's factory in Decatur, Alabama, for modifications to ensure it won't succumb to high pressures. It will fly on a future Vulcan mission, while the factory team brought forward another Centaur V, with additional stainless steel reinforcers on its forward dome, on the production line to fly on the first Vulcan rocket.
Earlier this month, Bruno posted on the social media platform X that ULA finished final assembly of the Centaur V upper stage for the inaugural Vulcan launch. Next up was a round of checks in a high-pressure test cell, installing insulation, and transport by boat from Alabama to Florida for launch preparations in November. At the launch site, ULA will lift the Centaur upper stage atop its already-in-place first stage, add two strap-on solid rocket boosters, and finally hoist the nose cone and payload on top of the launcher.
But that's not the whole story. In parallel, ULA is running another Centaur V upper stage through a repeat of the pressure testing that resulted in the explosion in March. In July, Bruno said ULA's engineers wanted to at least partially complete these checks, called qualification testing, to ensure the Centaur V upper stage can withstand the specific loads it will see on the first Vulcan mission. Later, ULA will complete the qualification testing through a range of different mission profiles, each with different structural stress levels, to make sure the upper stage can handle all of the Vulcan missions in ULA's backlog.
ULA and its anchor customers—the US military and Amazon—are eager for the debut of the Vulcan rocket, which was originally supposed to fly in 2019. It will replace ULA's Atlas and Delta rockets, and the Pentagon chose it in 2020 to launch the majority of the military's national security space missions through 2027, with SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy winning second place.
SpaceX's rockets are flying with unprecedented regularity, while the Vulcan still hasn't gotten off the ground. ULA shuffled one of the military launch contracts originally assigned to Vulcan to fly instead on the Atlas V rocket, but there's a finite number of Atlas and Delta rockets left in ULA's inventory. They need Vulcan.
Go for shipment
Later this week, Astrobotic's lunar lander will depart Pittsburgh for the cross-country trip to a satellite processing facility near Cape Canaveral. There, technicians will perform final functional checks, fill the spacecraft with propellant for its landing engines, and remove covers from cameras and thrusters.
“We’re go for shipment this Friday," said Sharad Bhaskaran, Astrobotic's mission manager for the first Peregrine lander, which stands about 6 feet (1.9 meters) tall on its four landing legs.
Founded in 2007, Astrobotic finished final testing on the Peregrine lander back in January, when ULA thought it had a chance to launch the Vulcan rocket in the spring. But until this week, Astrobotic never got the call from ULA to give the green light for shipping the spacecraft to the launch site.
“It has been a long, long time coming," John Thornton, Astrobotic's CEO, told Ars on Tuesday. "We’re very excited that it's finally here, 16 years in the making, and now we're finally ready to ship to the launch site.
This mission is one of the first two commercial Moon landers to fly under the banner of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which began in 2018 with the purpose of buying commercial transportation to the Moon for the agency's scientific instruments. The CLPS program, in many ways, is a precursor to the Artemis program to return humans to the surface of the Moon.
NASA awarded Astrobotic a $79.5 million contract in 2019 to arrange for delivery of its scientific instruments to the Moon on the Peregrine lander. Astrobotic also has another CLPS contract with NASA for a Moon landing with a larger spacecraft scheduled for late 2024.
Intuitive Machines, a Houston-based company, recently completed its Nova-C lander for launch later this year on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Like Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines aims to ferry NASA payloads to the Moon's surface under a contract won through the CLPS program.
Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines are vying to achieve the first successful soft landing of a US spacecraft on the Moon since the last Apollo mission in 1972. Both won their NASA contracts in 2019 and initially hoped to launch in 2021. Now, it turns out both should be ready at about the same time.
"Ultimately, the timing of both our launches is somewhat aligning," Bhaskaran said. "It's going to be fun to watch Intuitive Machines, and it's going to be fun, as well, to see our mission get off the ground and then of course, hopefully, make a successful landing."
Assuming the Vulcan rocket flies around Christmas, it will place the Astrobotic lander into a high-altitude orbit, where it will make one loop around Earth before intercepting the Moon a quarter-million miles from Earth around 15 days after liftoff, Bhaskaran said.
"Then we'll go into lunar orbit, and then proceed to orbital operations before we commence our landing sequences," he said.
Oct. 25, 2023: This story was updated with additional comments from Tory Bruno about launch time.
