United Launch Alliance’s first Vulcan rocket is preparing to blast off from the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
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ULA’s fully stacked Vulcan rocket can be clearly seen for the first time during deployment from its vertical hangar.
Stephen Clark/Ars Technica
This version of ULA’s Vulcan rocket is 202 feet (61.6 meters) tall.
Stephen Clark/Ars Technica
The Vulcan rocket was installed atop a mobile launch platform that traveled a third of a mile to Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral.
For its first flight, the Vulcan rocket will be adorned with a red flaming insignia, the U.S. flag, and the logos of the United Launch Alliance and Astrobotic, the company that owns the lunar module, inside the rocket’s payload fairing. .
Stephen Clark/Ars Technica
The Vulcan rocket will pass the halfway mark on its journey to the launch pad on Friday.
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Engineers gather as ULA’s Vulcan rocket approaches its launch pad.
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Two “trackmobile” locomotives propelled the Vulcan rocket and its mobile launch pad to the launch pad, traveling along a dual track.
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It took about 30 minutes for the Vulcan rocket to complete its deployment to the launch pad.
Stephen Clark/Ars Technica
The launch is scheduled for Monday at 2:18 a.m. ET (7:18 UTC).
Stephen Clark/Ars Technica
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—United Launch Alliance’s first Vulcan rocket emerged from its hangar Friday and made the 30-minute journey to its Florida launch pad, finally hitting the starting pad after a decade of development and testing. moved.
It was the first time anyone had seen the complete 202-foot-tall (61.6-meter) full-scale Vulcan rocket. Since ULA finished assembling the rocket last month, it has been stored in scaffolding in the company’s vertical hangar at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
On Friday, ULA ground crews rolled the Vulcan rocket and mobile launch pad to the beachfront launch pad. This was one of the final steps before the Vulcan rocket received clearance to launch Monday at 2:18 a.m. ET (7:18 UTC). On Sunday afternoon, ULA engineers will gather inside the Cape Canaveral control center to oversee an 11-hour countdown during which the Vulcan rocket will be loaded with methane, liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants.
ULA has a 45-minute launch window to begin its mission on Monday, with an 85 percent chance of good weather.
If the rocket does not take off on Monday, ULA has backup launch opportunities on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. In that case, the company would have to suspend operations until January 23, when there is a gap in launch possibilities constrained by the trajectory of the Vulcan rocket’s payload. A commercial robotic lunar lander developed by Pennsylvania company Astrobotic will be the main passenger on Vulcan’s first flight.
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This is a big moment for ULA, a 50-50 joint venture formed in 2006 when the launch divisions of Boeing and Lockheed Martin merged. Mark Peller, ULA’s vice president of Vulcan development, said the Vulcan rocket literally represents the company’s future. It will replace ULA’s Atlas and Delta rocket families, whose pedigree dates back to the early Space Age.
“There was an opportunity to develop a new rocket that could do everything Atlas and Delta could do, but with even greater performance and take advantage of the latest technology,” Peller said Friday. “The systems we have developed and are about to fly give us a very bright and prosperous future for many years to come.”
Facing stiff competition from SpaceX, which was still a launch startup a decade ago, ULA officials decided they needed a new rocket that was cheaper to build and fly than the Atlas V and Delta IV. . Ars tracks a timeline of Vulcan’s history, which includes lawsuits, changes in corporate leadership, delays and setbacks, and recently reports that Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Co. have put ULA up for sale.
ULA sold dozens of Vulcan missions to the U.S. military and Amazon for the Project Kuiper Broadband Network. For the military, the Pentagon wants to have at least two independent launch providers capable of putting national security satellites into orbit, so ULA could count on stable government contracts. .
Amazon has booked launches with nearly every major Western launch company except SpaceX, a competitor in the broadband satellite business. This also ensured that ULA would significantly reduce work on his $10 billion Kuiper satellite constellation in Amazon.
The Vulcan rocket “has already proven to be a very competitive product on the market, with an order book for over 70 missions before its first flight, which is truly unprecedented,” Peller said. “So this is our future, and we’re off to a great start with a really solid trajectory with Vulcan.”
But it still needs to fly, and ULA is betting on its 100% mission success record with Vulcan’s test flight scheduled for Monday.
“We have been very rigorous in qualifying Vulcan, which includes several years of rigorous testing of components, subsystems and key elements of the rocket, as well as testing here at the launch site. “Peller said. With extensive simulation using the latest tools, we do everything possible to fly your rocket in simulation before you actually fly it.
“Many of the new systems we are flying on Vulcan have benefited from recent introductions to Atlas and Delta.Many of the systems we are flying here have actually had considerable flight experience. ” he said. he continued. “But… this is still the first time this vehicle has flown and we will be watching this very closely and seeing what we learn from it. We are working on this with very high confidence. If there are any observations during the first flight, we will react and address them and be ready to quickly turn around and fly again.”
The new rocket’s first stage is powered by two Blue Origin methane-fueled BE-4 engines. These engines have been tested countless times on the ground, but never before in flight.
Vulcan’s upper stage, called Centaur V, is an upgraded twin-engine version of the single-engine upper stage that flies on an Atlas V rocket. The Centaur upper stage’s hydrogen-fueled RL10 engine is similar in design to those flown on all Atlas V and Delta IV rockets, but the Centaur V is much larger. One of Vulcan’s upgraded upper stages exploded during a ground test last year, forcing ULA to postpone the rocket’s debut flight by several months while engineers strengthened the Centaur’s stainless steel hydrogen tanks.
This version of the Vulcan rocket is equipped with two Northrop Grumman strap-on solid-fuel boosters. These are higher-thrust boosters than the strap-on rockets used on ULA’s previous rockets. In the future, the Vulcan rocket will be available in versions with zero, two, four or six solid rocket boosters, allowing ULA to adapt the rocket’s lift capacity to the requirements of each mission. It will look like this.
The most powerful version of Vulcan will surpass ULA’s largest current rocket, the Delta IV Heavy. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket can handle heavier payloads flown into low-Earth orbit and has lift capabilities similar to those in high-altitude orbit.
However, ULA’s Vulcan will be operated as a completely disposable rocket. The company plans to phase in upgrades to recover and reuse its two BE-4 engines, but Pera said Friday it would take “several years” to begin reusing the engines. Ta.
ULA said its initial focus will be on fully qualifying the Vulcan rocket to launch U.S. military satellites later this year. The first Vulcan flight, which ULA calls “Cert-1,” will be followed by a “Cert-2” mission as early as April, when Sierra Space’s commercial spaceplane “Dream Chaser” will fly on a resupply mission to the International Space Station. It is scheduled to be launched.
If these two launches are successful, the Space Force could approve launching national security payloads to the Balkans in the second half of this year.
Listing image by Stephen Clark/Ars Technica