WASHINGTON — United Launch Alliance (ULA) President and CEO Tory Bruno expressed confidence in his company’s ability to meet ambitious launch targets for its new Vulcan Centaur vehicle despite the rocket still awaiting final certification from the U.S. Space Force following an anomaly during its second demonstration flight in October 2024.
“Vulcan is on track, it’s actually been a pretty clean development,” Bruno said on the “Space Minds” podcast hosted by SpaceNews.
Bruno shared that ULA has six Vulcan rockets currently in production while awaiting the Space Force’s decision to clear the vehicle for national security space missions, reflecting ULA’s commitment to maintaining readiness despite certification delays. “I never stopped building rockets while we were sorting through this stuff,” Bruno said. “I actually have a stockpile. I’ve got like six Vulcans. I’ve got over a dozen Atlases. I have solid rocket motors, in the dozens.”
During Vulcan’s second flight, one of the rocket’s solid rocket boosters lost a nozzle — an issue that Bruno insisted had minimal impact on the launch performance.
“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,” Bruno explained. “It was a minor impact on the total energy of the rocket.”
He said ULA and solid rocket booster supplier Northrop Grumman conducted a successful static firing test of a GEM-63XL solid rocket booster last month at Northrop’s facility in Promontory, Utah, as part of the investigation into the anomaly.
Vulcan Centaur, which debuted in January 2024, is a critical component of the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 program. ULA was selected in 2020 as one of the primary launch providers for military and intelligence satellite missions through 2027. Until that certification is complete, SpaceX is the only provider flying NSSL missions.
The first NSSL mission scheduled for Vulcan is USSF-106, carrying an Air Force navigation satellite known as NTS-3 manufactured by L3Harris. ULA had been preparing for this launch earlier in the year but due to certification delays, it had to disassemble the Vulcan booster at its Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, to accommodate an Atlas 5 rocket.
The U.S. Space Force said it expects Vulcan to launch 11 national security missions this year. Bruno pointed out there is inherent unpredictability in national security launch schedules, noting that “about half of the spacecraft end up needing to move right, and they move right by a lot.”
“We’ll know as we get deeper into the year how many satellites will be where they need to be,” he said, adding that NSSL payload deliveries are frequently delayed “because they are exquisite technology.”
