ULA's Vulcan rocket is set to fly again on Friday the 13th, its first launch since a solid rocket booster nozzle failed in February. The mission matters well beyond one rocket: the Pentagon plans to rely on Vulcan for roughly half of its major launches through the early 2030s.
The payload is 40 satellites for Amazon Leo, the broadband network that could one day compete with SpaceX's Starlink. It is the first of 38 Vulcan flights Amazon has booked. Liftoff is planned from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, and ULA says the date still depends on range approval. This will also be the first Vulcan launch with a full set of six solid rocket boosters.
What went wrong with the boosters
Nozzle failures hit the solid boosters on two of Vulcan's first four missions, the latest in February. Both times the rocket recovered and finished its job, but Space Force officials lost confidence in it anyway. Investigators blamed the first case, in 2024, on a manufacturing defect in an insulator that shields the nozzle's metal structure from the exhaust.
The February root cause has not been made public by ULA or booster maker Northrop Grumman, and neither answered Ars Technica's questions on Wednesday. ULA says engineers found "several potential contributors" and mitigated them with design and process changes. It adds that more testing and analysis will run in parallel with the mission. In plain terms: the fix is being flown while still being validated.
That leaves outsiders with little to go on. Neither company has said publicly what the redesigned nozzle changes compared with the version that failed, beyond the general description of design and process changes, and without a named cause nobody outside can check whether those changes aim at the actual problem. A clean flight would be good evidence, but a single launch cannot rule out a flaw that shows up only some of the time, which is part of why the Space Force is watching so closely.
What the Space Force has already moved
The grounding has had a cost. The Space Force shifted six missions off Vulcan to SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, including three GPS satellites, a Space Development Agency launch, the Air Force Research Laboratory's Oracle-M lunar mission and a large missile warning satellite. ULA received six future missions originally assigned to SpaceX in return, so the number of missions each company holds has not changed so far.
The Space Force certified Vulcan for national security launches in 2025 and flew two missions before the February incident. A clean flight Friday would help rebuild that trust. Another nozzle problem, even a survivable one, would be harder to explain.
Watch for the range go-ahead, and for whether ULA or Northrop names a root cause after the flight. Do you think the Pentagon should keep splitting launches between two providers, even when one is far busier?
Sources
- 1.ULA's Vulcan rocket is set to return to flight on Friday the 13th · Ars Technica
Reported by the WattsUpNext desk from the sources linked below. Spot an error? Tell us at corrections@wattsupnext.com.
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