Inside the Making of ULA’s Next Rocket

Click here for Notes and Transcript

Time Markers

00:21 – Introduction and a walk through of the early Vulcan design conversation and what was learned in this process of building a rocket.

02:46 – What did you learn, and what would you say were some of the successes and the failures in the process of designing Vulcan?

06:07 – What long term problems does Vulcan solve, and what kind of possibilities does it open up?

11:27 – What does that you know when you talk about that maneuverability?

13:38 – Do you feel that Vulcan is on track for 11 Space Force launches this year?

16:15 – You post to Medium longer articles, why is it important for you to do some of that writing?

19:04 – How do your passions outside of ULA influence how you think about space and what ULA should be doing?

22:18 – What do you think this space industry looks like in five years or so?

25:12 – Space Takes with Mike Gruss and David Ariosto. First up, this weeks moon landing and the NASA CLPS program.

33:26 – Trade policy and tariff wars.

38:44 – On China’s future lunar missions.

Transcript – Tory Bruno Conversation

Mike Gruss – I’m joined today by Tory Bruno of United Launch Alliance (ULA), Tory, let’s start by talking about Vulcan. It’s been about 10 years since I believe you told the ULA board, possibly on your first day that the company needed a new rocket. Since then, it’s launched twice. I think maybe there were some concerns initially, it may be just a paper rocket, but walk me through that initial conversation and what you’ve learned in this process of building a rocket.

Tory Bruno – Yeah, sure. Well, the initial conversation was, was about the country’s needs. So this was really being driven out of Congress, and, in fact, really Senator McCain, who said, you know, we’ve had the Atlas rocket, which is powered by the Russia. An RD-180 rocket engine on its booster for many, many years, something we were asked to do at the end of the Cold War to keep those Russian rocket scientists from wandering off to Iran and North Korea. But the time has come to not be dependent on that anymore, and what really stimulated it was the recent invasion of Crimea. And so I went to the board and said, You know, I agree with the senator, it’s time, it’s time to move off the mighty Atlas, and therefore you have to have a new rocket. So why can’t you re engine it? And I said, Well, that’s not how rockets work. The engine can either be designed for the rocket, or the rocket can be designed for the engine. There really isn’t anything available, like anything like a drop in that’s just not how it’s done. And so we had long conversations about how long that would take, and what it would cost, and business case things. And of course, coming back to the nation’s need at that time we were at there were people starting new Space Launch companies at that moment, but really weren’t able to fly the missions that that the national security customer needed. So there really wasn’t any choice here. We had to go do it, and it took a lot of business processes and disciplines around that, and findings finding the right engine to get developed, but that’s where we ended up in you know, the rest is history.

Mike Gruss – What did you learn in that process? Because that’s that’s not something that every company gets to do or that every company gets to see come to reality. So what, what did you learn, and what would you say were some of the successes and the failures in that, in that process?

Tory Bruno – Well, you know, I gotta, I gotta start by by admitting to you, this is not my first rocket. Yeah, I’ve developed, probably, I don’t know, three dozen systems, and not even my first space launch vehicle. So in terms of that, you know, development process there that was pretty familiar to me, and I had even done agile development in the last couple of vehicles I developed before I came here, which we used on Vulcan, which is a new technique that is a different way of doing a systems engineering that lets you refine it as you go and maybe be a little bit faster. That’s why they call it agile. But the part that I would say was new were all of the stakeholders, I’ll even use the word, all of the politics associated with the choice of that engine. And it’s one of the few times I would say that that that environment was pretty dominant. You know, I went out and surveyed the world, literally the world, anybody who had a rocket engine in that class, even on a napkin. We talked to him, we evaluated him, we tried to see if how we could make the finances work, because it’s pretty expensive to develop a new launch vehicle, all of that. And, you know, I’ll, I’ll give you one, one story that was kind of painful.

You know, we found a company that was in development for rocket engine. It was a little less mature than the Blue Origin be four, but it was, it was just the right engine, and they felt they had state backing for it. So we were going to be able to make all this work financially. And we like the performance specs on this thing. And we they even flew out, and I’m going to say this was a, I’m going to save the punchline for a minute, but this was an international partner, right? And so they came out, and we spent, like, a couple of days with them, going through all the technology and everything, and feeling really good about it. When we finally got done, I said, I need to go in, close the door in my office, get on my computer and do some Google in here, because this company’s in Ukraine, and I need to know exactly where they are located. And at that time, they were, I think they were 20 miles from the border of conflict in the disputed zone. Today, they’re on the other side of the border. And so I said, Okay, that’s that’s not that one’s not working. Doesn’t solve the problem. For you, did not solve the problem. And they were being cagey, you know, like, I mean, I’ll tell you they had an address that was all the way on the other side of the country, but the actual factory is now on the wrong side of that front that is being contested. So anyway, so we went through that whole process and we ended up right, you know, right where we are now, which is the right place to be with Blue Origin.

Mike Gruss – Can you talk a little bit about what long term problems Vulcan solves, and what kind of possibilities does it open up? I mean, I think obviously, right now we’re in this era where there’s a lot of ambition for space. And so how does Vulcan solve some of those long term problems, and not just the not just the immediate, near term needs.

Tory Bruno – Sure, well, I always try and look at the big picture, and sometimes I’ll say, especially national security, that has a lot to do with the geopolitics that are transpiring the world, and where those trends are going to take our adversaries and what our country is going to need. And I was fortunate in this case, because I did that here and and I’ll say it’s played out pretty much as I expected, with one or two exceptions. And Vulcan was always skating to that puck that I anticipated being here, you know, eight, nine, ten years away from where we started. When I came to Ula and had this particular challenge. The environment was very different in terms of national security. The customer was had missions. They had missions that were important, but the focus was really getting by with a minimum solution. The cost is that was as cheap as it could be. That was the whole focus. And there was no focus on peer adversaries or near peer adversaries, those were imagined to be way off in the future. So it was just about, I mean, I’ll say it. It was about coasting through and keeping the capabilities in place that were necessary for the country. At that time, I felt that was not going to last, that this was going to be all about China, that China was going to be a problem for us a lot sooner than they imagined, and that it would unfold differently in space than the doctrine and the conventional thinking at that time. At that time, the thought process was that China was a couple of decades off as a serious problem for us, and that the real concern would be if there were regional or local, terrestrial conflict like Taiwan, that it could escalate into space, and all we needed to do was to try and discourage that escalation. I knew that, no, that’s not what’s going to happen. What will happen is a terrestrial conflict like that will start in space, absolutely start there, and as a prelude to allow that terrestrial conflict and for an adversary like China or Russia, but really China, we’re talking about China, to have the confidence and the boldness that they could level that playing field conventionally, in order to seek whatever those goals are in the in that Taiwan would be a nearer term problem. And I think everyone knows today that we’re very focused on that now, that is the thing. So I had a difficult decision to make at the beginning of this journey, which is, I think, really the root of your question. When you design a rocket, you have to decide what it’s for. It can do a lot of things, but it has a mission that it is most efficient at. That means highest performance, lowest cost, most flexibility for that mission, and at that time, propagating even forward. Today, all the new vehicles are really designed for Leo operations in a commercial marketplace. They all are, and there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s where all the business is. I’ll come back to that in a minute in terms of these low latency Leo constellations. And I felt that, well, that market will probably get served, and what the country is going to really need is a high energy orbit national security vehicle, because the problem with China is coming way faster than they think it is and and that was our heritage. It’s what my team was good at. So there were other reasons to want to do that, but I made that choice. I go, Okay, we’re going to design this for the most difficult in our world. It’s the most difficult directly injected GEO mission of a national security payload that there is, and that’s what will be the most competitive and the most used to the nation. And we made that commitment. If you get that wrong, you come out of a development cycle, 789, years later, you know, x billion dollars without a viable product. So it’s a big gamble, and it was a big choice, I believe, well, I know now that time has transpired that we made the right call. So that’s what it’s for. That’s what it does. It also gives us the platform to extend to what I think is the next serious need that will be required, which is real maneuver and mobility in space through. Face transportation, because this is an ideal platform to do that from. So still looking ahead a few years, I think you’re going to see that become pretty important.

Mike Gruss – Tell me what that looks like. What does that you know when you talk about that maneuverability? What does that mean? What does that translate to?

Tory Bruno – So today, as people think about it, they’re imagining repositioning satellites maybe servicing them. Some of that just because the need changes where they want it. Some of it’s because they might be under threat. And the vision for that is spacecraft moving themselves around, or other dedicated spacecraft moving another satellite. And in terms of mobility, it’s pretty limited. You know, if we brought that to something, you know, an analogy we might understand on the ground. It’s, it’s kind of like having a bicycle instead of a car. It goes slow, it doesn’t go very far. You can take one or two journeys, and you’re kind of tuckered out, you know? And what we really need is to be able to move or maneuver at will as often as we want, as far as we want, and do it fast. And that isn’t a satellite, that’s a rocket, that’s a booster, that’s an upper stage. So because Vulcan is designed for the kind of mission that I talked about, it positions its upper stage for a mission like that very well. A Leo rocket, like all the other rockets, the booster is going to go sort of halfway to space, and it’s going to hand over to that upper stage to finish the job. Because it’s done, it’s done in low Earth orbit. I mean, it stages inside the atmosphere, only, only a little bit higher than the highest aircraft has flown. When you want to do this other mission I talked about, the booster has got to go all the way space and drop off a stage up there, still full of propellant, because the upper stage can’t help you get to Leo. It’s got to go from Leo somewhere else. That means, when we’re in space, we have an awful lot of energy. And so our our future focus in for Vulcan is, what do you do with that energy? How can we use that to solve these problems for national security.

Mike Gruss – I want to ask one quick question following up on that, which is, I know the Space Force is obviously counting on Vulcan for a series of national security missions later this year. Do you feel that Vulcan is on track for that? And that’s the numbers that that the Space Force. Later, I want to say it’s 11 missions that that’s that’s going to happen.

Tory Bruno – Yes, Vulcan is on track. It’s actually been a pretty clean development. You know, we have flown a couple times. The second time we flew, we lost a nozzle off of one of the SRM’s (solid rocket motor). SRM’s, by the way, are a clever thing you do in rocket design, and I’ll come back to that in a minute, if I remember. But losing a nozzle, it’s like the only thing you can lose off a solid rocket motor and not care much. And the rocket didn’t care at all. Vulcan was a beast. It just flew right through it. It was a minor impact on the total energy of the rocket. We understand what happened. We have corrective actions. We just did a big static firing in Utah to validate all of that. So we’re back on track with that. So I’m feeling very confident about it in terms of, you know, flying, how many times this year and how many missions I’ll have the rockets there, because I never stopped building rockets while we were sorting through this stuff. I actually have a stockpile. I’ve got, like, six Vulcans. I’ve got over a dozen atlases. I have solid rocket motors, you know, in the dozens. So if the satellites are coming, we’re going to be able to go fly them, and we’ll know as we get deeper into the year. You know how many satellites will be where they need to be. One of the things about national security space launches is that about half of the spacecraft end up needing to move right, and they move right by a lot. I won’t even, I won’t even tell you how many months and it’s they’re delayed. They’re delayed. And why? Because they are exquisite technology. You know, in the commercial world, people look for really cool solutions with technologies that aren’t actually that cutting edge. They’re they’re applied from something else, and that’s what makes them innovative in space. But the national security satellites, oh my gosh, they are pushing the envelope on what is even possible every time a new generation comes out. That’s why they move and so that’s just part of job

Mike Gruss – You talked about never stopping to build these rockets, and I think you’ve shared a lot of those images on social media. And I think, you know, for the 10 years or so you’ve been at ULA, you haven’t been shy about sharing your ideas and your thoughts. And I, you know, particularly, think some of your Medium posts have been very popular, but they’re not kind of the cookie cutter LinkedIn copy that we often see from a lot of people. So I wanted to ask, what drives you to to write, you know, really lengthy pieces, I would say, about aggression in space or hypersonic weapons, like, I think just, you know, my core question is, like, why is it important for you to do, do some of that writing, and to to share some of these ideas that maybe are not, maybe they’re launch adjacent, but they’re not core to launch.

Tory Bruno – Yeah, well, I mean, the first thing is, they feel different because I write them myself. There’s no professional writers. It’s just me. So, you know, apologies for grammatical and spelling errors, but so I do write them in I’m always writing it because I’m perceiving that there’s a topic in front of policy makers and people who care about space or national security, that is not being well understood at the moment, and so I feel that I am able I want to help clarify it, and a little bit unique in our world, in that I have done so many different things over my career. I have a really deep background in nuclear deterrence. I have developed and fielded missile defense systems, Space Launch directed energy, and I’ve built and flown a number of hypersonic lighters. And so I have that technical expertise, but also from really, you know, I policy, a systems engineering, a big picture, a big picture view about what these things are for, how they work and how you could use them. And so I feel like it’s an obligation when I see something like that that is murky to people that I understand, and I only understand, not because I’m smarter than other people, just because I’ve had just the fortune over the years to work across so many different domains that I can put those pieces together. And it’s just a happenstance artifact of the career path I’ve journeyed through that I feel obligated to try and contribute, and so I’ll write something like that to try and help. And I, you know, sometimes people read it and get it and, you know, sometimes they don’t, but I’ve done my best.

Mike Gruss – I think the other thing that’s been interesting about some of that is that you show maybe a little bit more of yourself than maybe some other executives might. I mean, you, you’ve talked about ranching a lot. You’ve written, obviously, about the Knights Templar in the past. How does, how do some of these outside passions? And I don’t think that’s an exaggeration to say, but you know, you have these, these passions, beyond being a rocket scientist, how? How do they influence how you think about space and what ULA should be doing?

Tory Bruno – Oh yeah, geez. What a great question. Well, first off, everybody needs a hobby. And, you know, I feel space is so important to all our lives that it should be more transparent. And it really is people. People think of it as, I think, often times, as giant institutions that are faceless, or the big monuments we call them in the industry, the physical things that that comprise the infrastructure that makes it happen, because they’re huge and they’re billions of dollars, but really none of that has any value without individual people who are committed to the missions and know how to do it. And so I want to make it human. And so I’m not afraid to do that. And to, you know, show people that no, you know, the people who who help keep our country safe and protect the weather and, you know, explore Mars and all these things are just people just like you and other, you know, everyone can aspire to be in this world. And, you know, it’s important to understand it and to understand the value of human beings in that the human capital that makes it work. And you know, I think that the things that I bring to that, in those conversations, they influenced me and how I approach this work. You write about that? You know, growing up on a ranch, you you encounter all kinds of problems every day. You You really don’t have any money. You can’t just solve them with money. I mean, it’s not like Yellowstone ranchers are generally not affluent, and by definition, you’re also often a remote. Somewhere, so you can’t run and buy something. You just gotta solve these problems, and it makes you creative and gives you a certain level of determination. And I think all of that has served me well over the years. The Knights Templar is fun. You know, it’s the history of the Crusades are more dramatic and over the top and in salacious than any Hollywood movie you’ve ever seen. The movies about them are actually kind of toned down, because I don’t think people would believe it. So it’s super duper entertaining. And the part of the Crusades that that I’ve written about, I are just very unique even within that. So you mentioned the Templars, right? So it’s this weird amalgamation of of religion and and, you know, military activities, but also business and so I take business lessons from one of these pioneering organizations as well.

Mike Gruss – Yeah, all right. Last question, we’re just about out of time, but I wanted to hear what you think the future holds for large legacy defense contractors in space. Obviously, ULA is owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin. I think there’s a lot of enthusiasm right now for the space economy, but I think maybe that enthusiasm is coming from different corners of the space economy. What obstacles do you see kind of standing in the way for some of these large companies like Ula, but not only Ula. And what do you think this space industry looks like in five years or so?

Tory Bruno – Yeah. Well, I, you know, I would, I would tell the big primes that what the country needs you to do now, what the market needs you to do today, is to go back to your roots in a lot of ways. You know, when I was earlier in my career and working on these kind of systems, the it was a different environment to be in. In it was, I would say, could be characterized by a willingness in an ability to very quickly on, you know, moments notice, throw together small, agile teams by plucking people from places, put them on a problem right away that either needed to get solved by the company, needed to get solved by the nation. And then the cool thing about being at a prime in those days, apart from that agility, is those people were immediately plugged into tremendous technical depth, I mean literally, the world’s experts on a whole host of technologies and phenomenon, so that they had the agility to be a little teamwork in this thing, while that deep, deep capability. And so if I were in that situation, I would look at that’s what we need going forward, because we’re back in that kind of environment. And so I would look to invest more in technology. I would want to see for the big primes. I’d want to see them reconstitute their research labs. I worked in a research lab at Lockheed for a while. It was it was tremendous. What could be done in there and to bring more vertical integration back in in the late 90’s and early 2000’s there was a big movement in defense industry, I think because of contraction of of outsourcing things into a supply chain. Some things belong in a supply chain. It went way too far. Bring that stuff back in, spend money on your own technical depth and expertise, put the labs back in place and be agile to solve these problems.

Mike Gruss – I think that’s a great place to stop. Tory, thanks so much for joining us.

Tory Bruno – My pleasure. This was fun.