Enlarge/ The Morrell Operations Center at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.
A lot goes into a successful rocket launch. It’s not just reliable engines, computers, and sophisticated guidance algorithms. There’s also the launch pad, and perhaps even more of an afterthought to casual observers, the roads, bridges, pipelines, and electrical infrastructure required to keep a spaceport humming.
Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, commander of the Space Force’s Eastern Range at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, calls this the “non-sexy stuff that we can’t launch without.” Much of the ground infrastructure at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, the military’s other launch range, is antiquated and needs upgrades or expansion.
“Things like roads, bridges, even just the entry into the base, the gate, communications infrastructure, power, we’re looking at overhauling and modernizing all of that because we really haven’t done a tech refresh on all of that in a very long time, at least 20 years, if not more,” said Col. James Horne, deputy director for the Space Force’s assured access to space directorate.
Getting a congressional appropriation for new rocket or spacecraft development, research into advanced technology, or military pay raises has generally been easier than securing funds for military construction projects.
“Trying to do all those upgrades on just our annual budget is not possible,” Panzenhagen said earlier his week in a presentation to the National Space Club Florida Committee.
Charging ahead
The Biden administration is requesting $1.3 billion over the next five years to revamp infrastructure at the Space Force’s ranges in Florida and California. According to Panzenhagen, one of the first projects will be an upgrade to the airfield at Cape Canaveral, where the military regularly delivers satellites and other equipment to the launch site.
But this funding won’t be enough for Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg to meet the Space Force’s projected launch demand fully. Last year, there were 72 orbital launch attempts from Florida and 30 launches from California.
“I would anticipate we’re going to do over 100 launches from the Cape this year,” Panzenhagen said. “And that puts a strain on a lot of our workforce, so we are doing process things to try to operate more smartly.”
Enlarge/ This long exposure photo shows a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket streaking into space from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. A few minutes later, the rocket’s side boosters returned to land at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station a few miles away.
There has been a significant uptick in launch cadence at Cape Canaveral. In 2008, there were only seven launches from the Florida spaceport. Since SpaceX started launching its Falcon 9 rocket in 2010, the launch cadence in Florida has been on a steady rise.
“This is not a hard limit, but I think at the Cape, we could probably push through somewhere on the order of 150 launches per year if we did nothing,” Horne told Ars in a recent interview. “And then probably 75 or so per year from Vandenberg. Everything we’re doing is continuing to improve that ability so that we’re not in the way. So whenever they say they need to go, we say yes.”
The Space Force provides security, weather forecasting, telemetry, and safety oversight services for all launches from Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg. The launch ranges in Florida and California are primarily responsible for ensuring the US military has an always-on capability to launch critical national security satellites. But the majority of launches from the military ranges are commercial missions.
Enlarge/ Vulcan launches from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Monday.
United Launch Alliance
Welcome to Edition 6.26 of the Rocket Report! We’re just 11 days into the new year, and we’ve already had two stunning rocket debuts. Vulcan soared into space on Monday morning, and then a medium-lift rocket from China, Gravity-1, made a picture-perfect launch from a mobile pad in the Yellow Sea. It feels like this could be a great year for lift.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Vega C return-to-flight mission gets a date. The European Space Agency said it is targeting November 15 for the return to flight of the grounded Avio-built Vega C launch vehicle, European Spaceflight reports. I’ll be honest. I had to double-check the calendar to make sure that it is in fact January, because that’s an oddly specific date for a launch 10 months from now. But it appears there is some, ahem, flexibility in that date. ESA director of space transportation Toni Tolker-Nielsen says: “The nominal date is 15 November. There is a very detailed plan that is leading to this.”
But then there are the caveats … The director of space transportation did, however, add that there was a month of schedule risks that may affect the launch date, summarizing that the launch “should be at least before the end of the year.” Tolker-Nielsen’s final word on the matter was not all that convincing. “We’re pretty sure of that,” he concluded. Vega C was grounded following a failed flight in late 2022. The flight is expected to carry the Sentinel 1C Earth observation satellite to orbit, which will replace the failed Sentinel 1B satellite, plugging a significant data gap. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
China completes commercial launch pad. A newly completed launch pad on China’s Hainan Island could increase China’s access to space, boosting national constellation projects and commercial launch plans, Space News reports. The first launch pad at Hainan Commercial Launch Site was finished in late December. It is the first of two pads that will host liquid propellant launch vehicles.
Fewer rockets falling into villages … The development is intended to ease a bottleneck of access to launch facilities for both national and commercial launch service providers and allow Chinese entities to speed up plans to launch a range of constellations. It should also increase China’s ability to deploy and maintain space assets, including remote sensing, communications, and other systems for civil and military purposes. Finally, it may help reduce incidents of booster debris falling around inhabited areas following launches from the country’s inland spaceports of Jiuquan, Taiyuan, and Xichang. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger’s space reporting is to sign up for his newsletter, we’ll collect his stories in your inbox.
Will spaceport make Australia a military target? Space company Equatorial Launch Australia has proposed a massive expansion of its space center near Nhulunbuy, around 1,000 km east of Darwin, which saw the launch of three NASA suborbital rockets in mid-2022. If approved, the plans would see the Arnhem Space Centre grow from one launchpad to 14, with the goal of launching dozens of rockets a year, the Australian Broadcast Corporation reports. The goal is to launch its first orbital rocket by 2025, said the launch site chief executive, Michael Jones.
But there’s a catch … While the plans have been welcomed by the local government and local businesses, they have drawn concerns from some, including a politician and Yolŋu traditional owner Yiŋiya Guyula. The Yolŋu are Aboriginal people who live in the Northern Territory of Australia. Guyula voiced fears that the Arnhem Space Centre could lead to missile testing and development on Yolŋu land. Other local officials have said the spaceport could result in the area becoming a potential military target. (submitted by ZygP)
Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.
Good morning. It’s January 11, and today’s image showcases a diffuse nebula known as NGC 7538, found in the constellation Cepheus.
Located some 9,000 light-years from Earth, the nebula is a region of active star formation and produces a large amount of hydrogen—which shows up in this image. The nebula contains a shockingly large protostar that is, astronomers estimate, some 300 times larger than our Solar System and has a mass of 2,000 Suns. Even as astronomical objects go, that’s gargantuan.
Paul Buckley submitted today’s photo, which he captured from his backyard in Elma, New York, located not far from Buffalo. He took the image over the first three days of last September. This image represents 100 six-minute narrowband images and 50 two-minute RGB images using his Celestron 9.25-inch Edge HD telescope.
Enlarge/ The business end of the Vulcan rocket performed flawlessly during its debut launch.
United Launch Alliance
Early Monday morning, the hefty Vulcan rocket streaked into orbit for the first time, nailing its performance targets and delivering a substantial success to United Launch Alliance on the vehicle’s first test flight.
Unfortunately for the mission’s primary customer, Astrobotic, there was subsequently an issue with the lunar lander’s propulsion system. However, Astrobotic was quick to clear Vulcan of any blame, saying the payload was delivered into the planned lunar trajectory without issue. “There is no indication that the propulsion anomaly occurred as a result of the launch,” Astrobotic said.
Vulcan’s debut was much-anticipated in the US launch community because the rocket provides a potentially viable competitor to the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets flown by SpaceX. The US Space Force, in particular, has been waiting on Vulcan to fly dozens of payloads into orbit.
So now that Vulcan has flown once, what’s next?
Next up, Dream Chaser
Just ahead of the launch, two vice presidents with United Launch Alliance, Mark Peller and Gary Wentz, held a teleconference with reporters to address the future of Vulcan.
United Launch Alliance, or ULA, has set aside the next 60 days to review data from the “Cert-1” certification mission that launched on Monday morning, they said. If the data looks good from that flight, the company will move into preparations for the next launch. Wentz said the earliest opportunity to launch this Cert-2 mission is “April-ish.”
The BE-4 rocket engines that will power this Vulcan are in final acceptance testing at Blue Origin’s facilities in West Texas, the officials said. The Vulcan core stage and Centaur upper stage are also in final assembly in ULA’s main factory in Decatur, Alabama. The hardware readiness should be capable of supporting an April launch.
The second Vulcan launch will carry the Dream Chaser spacecraft into orbit for Sierra Space. The winged vehicle will fly a cargo mission that carries supplies to the International Space Station for NASA. After more than a decade of development, Dream Chaser is undergoing final tests. However, there remain some questions about when it will be ready for its debut launch.
The Dream Chaser mission does not have a specific launch date on NASA’s internal schedule, but it shows a potential docking with the International Space Station for 45 days during a period between early April and mid-June. The docking port for the mission will not be needed by other spacecraft this year, so ULA and Sierra Space have some flexibility with the launch date.
Enlarge/ Artist’s view of the configuration of Ariane 6 using four boosters on the ELA-4 launch pad together with its mobile gantry.
ESA-D. Ducros
There is “no guarantee” France’s ArianeGroup will continue to be Europe’s rocket launch company of choice, according to the head of the European Space Agency, after ESA member states agreed to introduce more competition to the market.
Josef Aschbacher, the agency’s director-general, told the Financial Times that the decision at its space summit in Seville last November to open the European launcher market to competition was a “game-changer.”
The next generation of launch would be done “in a very different way,” he said, acknowledging that this would put pressure on ArianeGroup’s owners, Airbus and Safran. “If they have a very competitive launcher, then they are in the race. But there is no guarantee.”
Martin Sion, chief executive of ArianeGroup, which since 2017 has lost its dominance of the commercial launch market to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, said the company was ready for the challenge. “The rules are changing, we will adapt,” he said. “We are used to competition.”
However, Aschbacher’s comments, made in an interview late last year, are a clear warning to ArianeGroup, which has suffered serial delays on its latest launcher, Ariane 6, now expected to be four years late.
As a result of the delays, and problems with the smaller Vega-C, which is manufactured by Italy’s Avio, Europe has had to use SpaceX to send some of its most important satellites into orbit.
In November, France, Germany, and Italy agreed to inject new funds into the Ariane 6 program, but the rocket is not reusable and will still be more expensive than SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 when it finally launches around the middle of the year.
Guillaume Faury, Airbus chief executive, said in a separate interview that competition posed a serious challenge to ArianeGroup. “As one of the two shareholders, we are worried, as Ariane is today the incumbent,” he said. “The way to take our share is to make sure Ariane 6 will be a success.”
He acknowledged that Europe needed to find a more “market-driven” way to compete with lower-cost providers such as SpaceX but suggested it should not give up on Ariane in favor of a range of competing programs. Fragmentation would be “a disaster,” he said.
If the “result [of competition] is a different way being united around a small number of programs, where states put their efforts together to compete against the real competitors, which are . . . mainly SpaceX and the Chinese to come, that is OK,” he told the FT. “But the jury is out. For the moment what we observe is further fragmentation.”
Yet the ESA is determined to shake up the European commercial space sector by emulating the approach of NASA. Over the past two decades, the US space agency has shifted from buying rockets from incumbents such as Boeing and Lockheed’s United Launch Alliance to booking flight services.
By giving contracts to disruptive newcomers such as SpaceX, NASA has ensured the success of Elon Musk’s rocket company, and the cost of launching into space has fallen significantly.
“Competition is certainly the solution. It is a way of reducing cost and this is what we are planning to do in the next generation,” Aschbacher said. ESA has also challenged the private sector to develop a cargo vehicle that might eventually carry crew to the International Space Station by 2028, reducing its reliance on US providers.
Germany in particular is keen on more competition in the launcher market, as the home of some of Europe’s most advanced rocket start-ups such as Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg.
Although ArianeGroup was currently Europe’s only producer of heavy lift rockets, it was possible that new rivals could upset its monopoly for the generation after Ariane 6, said Caleb Henry, director of research at consultancy Quilty Space.
SpaceX “had a smaller rocket and reached space. That was enough to get . . . a significant chunk of the Department of Defense market,” he said. “So it is not at all a stretch to say someone developing a smaller rocket today could be making an Ariane-sized rocket tomorrow.”
Enlarge/ Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander is seen recently encapsulated inside the Vulcan rocket’s payload fairing.
On Monday morning, the new Vulcan rocket made a smashing debut, launching from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida and performing flawlessly. After 50 minutes of flight, the rocket’s upper stage deployed its primary payload—the Peregrine lunar lander—into a Moon-bound trajectory. United Launch Alliance declared complete success with its new rocket.
After the deployment of the spacecraft, its developer, Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic, also said its ground controllers had successfully established contact with Peregrine. All seemed well as the spacecraft entered a highly elliptical orbit that will bring it toward the Moon in the coming weeks.
However, later on Monday morning, about six hours after liftoff, Astrobotic released an updated statement. While the vehicle’s avionics systems, including the primary command and data handling unit and the thermal, propulsion, and power controllers, had all powered on and performed as expected, there was a problem.
“After successful propulsion systems activation, Peregrine entered a safe operational state,” the company said. “Unfortunately, an anomaly then occurred, which prevented Astrobotic from achieving a stable sun-pointing orientation. The team is responding in real time as the situation unfolds and will be providing updates as more data is obtained and analyzed.”
Batteries are draining
Less than an hour after its initial statement on the anomaly, Astrobotic issued a second update that sounded fairly ominous.
“We continue to gather data and report our best assessment of what we see,” the company said. “The team believes that the likely cause of the unstable sun-pointing is a propulsion anomaly that, if proven true, threatens the ability of the spacecraft to soft land on the Moon.”
Peregrine will need its main engine to control the spacecraft’s descent down to the lunar surface. Based on additional information provided by the company, it appears that time is running out to fix the problem.
“As the team fights to troubleshoot the issue, the spacecraft battery is reaching operationally low levels,” Astrobotic said. “Just before entering a known period of communication outage, the team developed and executed an improvised maneuver to reorient the solar panels toward the Sun. Shortly after this maneuver, the spacecraft entered an expected period of communication loss.”
According to NASA’s Deep Space Network website, Peregrine reestablished communication with the controllers on Earth by around 11: 30 am ET. The communication then stopped again about 15 minutes later.
Taking shots on goal
If engineers can address the pointing problem and get Peregrine powered back up, there is time to work on the propulsion issue. Due to the spacecraft’s circuitous route to the Moon, Peregrine is not due to land there until February 23.
The spacecraft was privately built and largely funded by NASA through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program. The US space agency paid $108 million for the delivery of several science experiments to the Moon, including a radiation sensor, spectrometers, and a laser retroreflector array on board Peregrine. Astrobotic has also sold some payload space to private companies.
With this commercial program, NASA chose to procure a lunar delivery service rather than building a lander on its own. This cost the agency significantly less but entailed more risk. The agency also has funded a lander built by another company, Intuitive Machines, that could launch next month on a Falcon 9 rocket. About 10 more commercial lunar payload missions are in the pipeline.
The former leader of NASA’s scientific programs, Thomas Zurbuchen, has previously said this innovative lunar program was designed with speed in mind and that the agency would tolerate some failures as it takes “shots on goal” in attempting to land on the Moon. “We do not expect every launch and landing to be successful.”
This story has been updated to reflect the issuance of a second statement by Astrobotic.
Enlarge/ The first Vulcan rocket fires off its launch pad in Florida.
United Launch Alliance
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—Right out of the gate, United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan rocket chased perfection.
The Vulcan launcher hit its marks after lifting off from Florida’s Space Coast for the first time early Monday, successfully deploying a commercial robotic lander on a journey to the Moon and keeping ULA’s unblemished success record intact.
“Yeehaw! I am so thrilled, I can’t tell you how much!” exclaimed Tory Bruno, ULA’s president and CEO, shortly after Vulcan’s departure from Cape Canaveral. “I am so proud of this team. Oh my gosh, this has been years of hard work. So far, this has been an absolutely beautiful mission.”
This was a pivotal moment for ULA, a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The Vulcan rocket will replace ULA’s mainstay rockets, the Atlas V and Delta IV, with lineages dating back to the dawn of the Space Age. ULA has contracts for more than 70 Vulcan missions in its backlog, primarily for the US military and Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband network.
The Vulcan rocket lived up to the moment Monday. It took nearly a decade for ULA to develop it, some four years longer than anticipated, but the first flight took off at the opening of the launch window on the first launch attempt.
Standing 202 feet (61.6 meters) tall, the Vulcan rocket ignited its two BE-4 main engines in the final seconds of a smooth countdown. A few moments later, two strap-on solid rocket boosters flashed to life to propel the Vulcan rocket off its launch pad at 2: 18 am EST (07: 18 UTC).
On the money
The BE-4 engines and solid-fueled boosters combined to generate more than 2 million pounds of thrust, vaulting Vulcan off the launch pad and through a thin cloud layer. A little over a minute after launch, Vulcan accelerated faster than the speed of sound, then jettisoned its strap-on boosters to fall into the Atlantic Ocean.
Then it was all BE-4. Each of these engines can produce more than a half-million pounds of thrust, consuming a mixture of liquified natural gas—essentially methane—and liquid oxygen. They are built by Blue Origin, the space company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos. This was the first time BE-4s have flown on a rocket.
Rob Gagnon, ULA’s telemetry commentator, calmly called out mission milestones. “BE-4s continue to operate nominally… Vehicle is continuing to fly down the center of the range track, everything looking good… Nice and smooth operation of the booster.”
The BE-4s fired for five minutes, then shut down to allow Vulcan’s first stage booster to fall away from the rocket’s hydrogen-fueled Centaur upper stage. Two RL10 engines ignited to continue the push into orbit, then switched off as the upper stage coasted over the Atlantic and Africa. A restart of the Centaur upper stage 43 minutes into the flight gave the rocket enough velocity to send Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander toward the Moon.
The nearly 1.5-ton spacecraft separated from Vulcan’s Centaur upper stage around 50 minutes after liftoff. “We have spacecraft separation, right on time,” Gagnon announced.
With Astrobotic’s lander deployed, a third engine firing on the Centaur upper stage moved the rocket off its Moon-bound trajectory and onto a course into heliocentric orbit. “We have now achieved Earth escape,” Gagnon said.
The spent rocket stage will become a human-made artificial satellite of the Sun. A plate on the side of the Centaur upper stage contains small capsules holding the cremated remains of more than 200 people, a “memorial spaceflight” arranged by a Houston-based private company named Celestis.
Enlarge/ The Moon sets over sandstone formations on the Navajo Nation.
Science instruments aren’t the only things hitching a ride to the Moon on a commercial lunar lander ready for launch Monday. Two companies specializing in “space burials” are sending cremated human remains to the Moon, and this doesn’t sit well with the Navajo Nation.
The Navajo people, one of the nation’s largest Indigenous groups, hold the Moon sacred, and putting human remains on the lunar surface amounts to desecration, according to Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren.
“The sacredness of the Moon is deeply embedded in the spirituality and heritage of many Indigenous cultures, including our own,” Nygren said in a statement. “The placement of human remains on the Moon is a profound desecration of this celestial body revered by our people.”
Last month, Nygren wrote a letter to NASA and the Department of Transportation, which licenses commercial space launches, requesting a postponement of the flight to the Moon. The human remains in question are mounted to the robotic Peregrine lander, built and owned by a Pittsburgh-based company named Astrobotic, poised for liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on top of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket.
This is the second time a US spacecraft has gone to the Moon with human remains aboard. In 1998, NASA’s Lunar Prospector mission launched with a small capsule containing the ashes of Eugene Shoemaker, a pioneer in planetary geology. NASA intentionally crashed spacecraft into the Moon in 1999, leaving Shoemaker’s ashes permanently on the surface.
At that time, officials from the Navajo Nation objected to the scattering of Shoemaker’s ashes on the Moon. NASA promised to consult with tribal officials before another spacecraft flew to the Moon with human remains. A big part of Nygren’s recent complaint was the lack of dialogue on the matter before this mission.
“This act disregards past agreements and promises of respect and consultation between NASA and the Navajo Nation, notably following the Lunar Prospector mission in 1998,” Nygren said in a statement. He added that the request for consultation is “rooted in a desire to ensure that our cultural practices, especially those related to the Moon and the treatment of the deceased, are respected.”
An oversight
Officials from the White House and NASA met with Nygren on Friday to discuss his concerns. Speaking with reporters after the meeting, Nygren said he believes it was an oversight that federal officials didn’t meet with the Navajo Nation at an earlier stage.
“I think being able to consult into the future is one of the things that they’re going to try to work on,” he told reporters Friday. While Nygren said that was good to hear, “we were given no reassurance that the human remains were not going to be transported to the Moon on Monday.”
Removing the human remains would delay the launch at least several weeks. It would require removing Astrobotic’s lunar lander from the top of the Vulcan rocket, taking it back to a clean room facility, and opening the payload fairing to provide access to the spacecraft.
“They’re not going to remove the human remains and keep them here on Earth where they were created, but instead, we were just told that a mistake has happened, we’re sorry, into the future we’re going to try to consult with you,” Nygren said.
“We take concerns expressed from the Navajo Nation very, very seriously,” said Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s science directorate. “And we think we’re going to be continuing this conversation.”
Enlarge/ Buu Nygren, president of the Navajo Nation.
Astrobotic’s mission is different from Lunar Prospector in one important sense. The Peregrine lander is privately owned, while Lunar Prospector was a government spacecraft. NASA has a $108 million contract with Astrobotic to deliver the agency’s science payloads to the Moon as a commercial service. Astrobotic’s mission is the first time a US company will attempt to land a commercial spacecraft on the Moon.
While Nygren argues that NASA’s role as Astrobotic’s anchor customer should give the agency some influence over decision-making, the government’s only legal authority in overseeing the mission is through the Federal Aviation Administration.
The FAA is responsible for ensuring commercial launches, like the Vulcan rocket flight Monday, don’t put public safety at risk. The launch licensing process also includes an FAA review to ensure a launch would not jeopardize US national security, foreign policy interests, or international obligations.
“For our own missions … NASA works to be very mindful of potential concerns for any work that we’ll do on the Moon,” Kearns said. “In this particular case … NASA really doesn’t have involvement or oversight.”
United Launch Alliance’s first Vulcan rocket prepares to emerge from the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
United Launch Alliance
ULA’s fully stacked Vulcan rocket is clearly visible for the first time during rollout from its vertical hangar.
Stephen Clark/Ars Technica
This version of ULA’s Vulcan rocket stands 202 feet (61.6 meters) tall.
Stephen Clark/Ars Technica
The Vulcan rocket was positioned on top of a mobile launch platform for the third-of-a-mile trek to Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral.
For its first flight, the Vulcan rocket is emblazoned with a red flame-like insignia, a US flag, and the logos of United Launch Alliance and Astrobotic, which owns the lunar lander nestled inside the rocket’s payload fairing.
Stephen Clark/Ars Technica
The Vulcan rocket passes the halfway point on its journey to the launch pad Friday.
United Launch Alliance
Technicians gather as ULA’s Vulcan rocket nears the launch pad.
United Launch Alliance
Two “trackmobile” locomotives propelled the Vulcan rocket and its mobile launch platform to the launch pad, riding along dual rail tracks.
United Launch Alliance
It took about a half-hour for the Vulcan rocket to complete its rollout to the launch pad.
Stephen Clark/Ars Technica
Liftoff is scheduled for 2: 18 am EST (07: 18 UTC) Monday.
Stephen Clark/Ars Technica
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—United Launch Alliance’s first Vulcan rocket emerged from its hangar Friday for a 30-minute trek to its launch pad in Florida, finally moving into the starting blocks after a decade of development and testing.
This was the first time anyone had seen the full-size 202-foot-tall (61.6-meter) Vulcan rocket in its full form. Since ULA finished assembling the rocket last month, it has been cocooned inside the scaffolding of the company’s vertical hangar at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
On Friday, ULA’s ground crew rolled the Vulcan rocket and its mobile launch platform to its seaside launch pad. It was one of the last steps before the Vulcan rocket is cleared for liftoff Monday at 2: 18 am EST (07: 18 UTC). On Sunday afternoon, ULA engineers will gather inside a control center at Cape Canaveral to oversee an 11-hour countdown, when the Vulcan rocket will be loaded with methane, liquid hydrogen, and liquid oxygen propellants.
ULA has a 45-minute launch window to get the mission off the ground on Monday, and there is an 85 percent chance of good weather.
If the rocket doesn’t take off Monday, ULA has backup launch opportunities Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Then, the company would have to stand down until January 23, a gap in launch availability constrained by the trajectory of the Vulcan rocket’s payload. A commercial robotic Moon lander, developed by a Pennsylvania company named Astrobotic, is the primary passenger on the inaugural flight of Vulcan.
In the wild
This is a big moment for ULA, a 50-50 joint venture formed in 2006 by the merger of Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s launch divisions. The Vulcan rocket, quite literally, is the embodiment of the company’s future, said Mark Peller, ULA’s vice president of Vulcan development. It will replace ULA’s fleet of Atlas and Delta rockets, with lineages dating back to the early years of the Space Age.
“There was an opportunity to develop a new rocket that can do everything Atlas and Delta could do, but do it with even greater performance, and taking advantage of the latest technology,” Peller said Friday. “The system that we’ve developed, and we’re about to fly, is really positioning us for a very bright, prosperous future for many, many years to come.”
Facing stiff competition from SpaceX, still an upstart in the launch business 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 has traced the history of Vulcan, a timeline that includes lawsuits, a change in corporate leadership, delays and setbacks, and, most recently, reports that Boeing and Lockheed Martin have put ULA up for sale.
ULA has sold dozens of Vulcan missions to the US military and Amazon for its Project Kuiper broadband network. In the military’s case, the Pentagon wants to have at least two independent launch providers capable of hauling national security satellites into orbit, so ULA has been able to count on a steady diet of government contracts.
Amazon booked launches with almost every major Western launch company besides SpaceX, its competitor in the broadband satellite business. This also ensured ULA a hefty cut of work for Amazon’s $10 billion Kuiper satellite constellation.
The Vulcan rocket “has proven to already be an extremely competitive product in the marketplace, having an order book of over 70 missions before first flight, which is really unheard of,” Peller said. “So it is the future of our company, and we’re off to a great start on a really solid trajectory with Vulcan.”
But it still needs to fly, and ULA is putting its record of 100 percent mission success on the line with the Vulcan test flight slated for Monday.
“We have very rigorously gone through a qualification of Vulcan,” Peller said. “That stretched over several years, involved rigorous testing of the components, the subsystems, and the major elements of the rocket as well as testing here at the launch site, extensive simulation using the latest tools to do everything we can to fly the rocket in simulation before we actually fly it.
“Many of the new systems that are flying on Vulcan had the benefit of being introduced on Atlas and Delta in recent years. So many of the systems that we’re flying here actually have a fair amount of flight experience under their belts,” he continued. “But … this is still the first time the vehicle has flown, and we will watch this very carefully and see what we learn from this. We’re going into this very high confidence. If there are any observations with the first flight, we’re prepared to respond and address those, and turn around quickly to fly again.”
The new rocket’s first stage is powered by two methane-fueled BE-4 engines from Blue Origin. While they’ve been tested on the ground countless times, these engines have never flown before.
Vulcan’s upper stage, called the Centaur V, is an upgraded twin-engine version of the single-engine upper stage that flies on the Atlas V rocket. The hydrogen-fueled RL10 engines on the Centaur upper stage are similar in design to the ones flown on every Atlas V and Delta IV rocket, but the Centaur V is much larger. One of the upgraded upper stages for Vulcan exploded during a ground test last year, forcing ULA to push back the rocket’s debut flight for months while engineers strengthened the Centaur’s stainless steel hydrogen tank.
This version of the Vulcan rocket is fitted with two strap-on solid-fueled boosters from Northrop Grumman. These are higher-thrust boosters than the strap-on rockets used on ULA’s previous rockets. In the future, Vulcan rockets will come in variants with zero, two, four, or six solid rocket boosters, allowing ULA to match the vehicle’s lift capability with each mission’s requirements.
The most powerful version of Vulcan will outlift the largest rocket in ULA’s current fleet, the Delta IV Heavy. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket can handle heavier payloads flying to low-Earth orbit and has a similar lift capability to higher-altitude orbits.
ULA’s Vulcan, though, will enter service as a fully expendable rocket. The company plans to gradually introduce an upgrade to recover and reuse the two BE-4 engines, although Peller said Friday that it will take a “few years” to begin reusing engines.
According to ULA, the initial focus is to fully certify the Vulcan rocket to launch US military satellites later this year. The first Vulcan flight, which ULA calls “Cert-1,” will be followed by a “Cert-2” mission as soon as April to launch Sierra Space’s commercial Dream Chaser spaceplane on a resupply mission to the International Space Station.
If those two launches go flawlessly, the Space Force could sign off on launching national security payloads on Vulcan in the second half of this year.
Enlarge/ United Launch Alliance hoists the Certification-1 payloads atop the Vulcan rocket in the Vertical Integration Facility adjacent to Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
United Launch Alliance
It’s nearly time. After years of delays, billions of dollars in federal funding, and a spectacular second-stage explosion, the large and impressive Vulcan rocket is finally ready to take flight.
United Launch Alliance’s heavy lift vehicle underwent its final review on Thursday, and the company cleared the rocket for its debut flight. With weather looking favorable, the Vulcan rocket is on track to lift off at 2: 18 am ET (7: 18 UTC) on Monday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The mission’s primary payload is a lunar lander built by Astrobotic, and the launch will be streamed live here.
This marks an absolutely pivotal moment for the 20-year-old launch company, which has gone from the titan of the US launch industry to playing a distant second fiddle to its one-time upstart competitor SpaceX. Last year, SpaceX launched 98 rockets. United Launch Alliance, or ULA, tallied just three. The owners of ULA, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, are also on the cusp of selling the launch company if they can find a buyer willing to pay the right price. And critically, for the first time, ULA will be flying a new vehicle it designed and developed on its own—a rocket with some but not a majority of its heritage from the legacy Atlas and Delta rockets that have flown since the Cold War.
So yeah, it’s a moment.
A little history
A quarter of a century ago, two of America’s largest aerospace contractors, Lockheed and Boeing, were the national leaders in providing launch services for the US military and many of NASA’s science missions. But they struggled to capture commercial satellite launches in an emerging market. Lockheed, with its Atlas rockets, and Boeing, with its Deltas, could not compete with Europe-based Arianespace and Russia on price. So the two US contractors doubled down on their competition for US government launch contracts.
The competition grew ugly, with allegations that Boeing stole rocket designs from Lockheed. The US Department of Justice began investigating how Boeing acquired tens of thousands of pages of trade secrets belonging to Lockheed Martin. There were lawsuits, and then questions about whether Boeing’s rocket business was viable. Military officials began to worry that if Boeing stopped flying the Delta, their only pathway into space would be through a Russian engine—the RD-180 that powered Lockheed’s Atlas V.
To ensure it had redundant access to space on two different rocket families, the military stepped in and arranged a shotgun marriage. The Department of Defense brokered a deal in which Lockheed and Boeing would merge their rocket-building ventures into one company, United Launch Alliance, in 2005. The parents retained a 50 percent ownership stake, and to sweeten the pot, the military agreed to pay a subsidy of about $1 billion a year.
Everything seemed to be working out well until SpaceX started launching rockets.
A little rivalry
ULA had tried to kill the baby. When SpaceX sought a launch site for its Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral in 2007, the parents lobbied the Air Force brass hard to stop the lease of Space Launch Complex-40 to Elon Musk and his rocket company. But the commander of the 45th Space Wing with oversight of Cape Canaveral, Gen. Susan Helms, approved the lease anyway.
Since then, ULA and SpaceX have been uneasy bedfellows in Florida, working side by side at nearby launch pads. Some of the rivalry was good-natured. Every week, for a while, engineers from SpaceX and ULA would meet up at Hogan’s Irish Bar in Cape Canaveral for trivia night. They would vie for nerd supremacy, drinking Guinness and blowing off steam.
But there have been more difficult confrontations. Musk kept pointing out the $1 billion subsidy at Congressional hearings—ULA officials bristled at the characterization of this ELC payment as a subsidy, but in effect, that’s what it was—and arguing that SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket could fly many of the military’s missions for much-reduced prices.
The issue came to a head in 2014, when the Air Force and ULA announced a new agreement for 36 national security launches to be flown during the remainder of the decade. ULA’s chief executive at the time, Mike Gass, hailed this “block buy” agreement because it would save the government $4.4 billion. Musk seethed. By then, his Falcon 9 rocket had launched eight times, all successfully. He sued the US government to stop the block buy and open up competition for the Falcon 9.
Several months into the lawsuit, SpaceX and the Air Force entered mediation. As part of the settlement, the military agreed to accelerate the certification of the Falcon 9 rocket and open up a number of the block buy launches to competition. SpaceX launched its first national security payload in 2017. SpaceX has not really looked back since.
Enlarge/ Jeff Bezos (right), the founder of Blue Origin and Amazon.com, and Tory Bruno, CEO of United Launch Alliance, display a small-scale version of the BE-4 rocket engine during a press conference in 2014.
Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.
Good morning. It’s January 5, and today’s photo reveals the Crab Nebula in all of its glory.
This object, known more formally as Messier 1 or M1, earned its colloquial name when Anglo-Irish astronomer William Parsons observed and drew this object in the early 1840s. It looked something like a crab with arms, and the appellation stuck. The nebula had been discovered about a century earlier by English astronomer John Bevis.
The nebula is actually a supernova remnant from a star that was observed popping in 1054 and recorded by Chinese astronomers. That must have been quite a sight, because the supernova occurred only about 2,000 light-years from Earth, which is relatively close as these things go. It likely was as bright as Venus and visible during daylight hours for a few weeks.
This image was captured by amateur astronomer Paul Macklin in Indiana. And it’s quite spectacular.
Enlarge/ Firefly Aerospace’s fourth Alpha rocket lifted off December 22 from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.
Welcome to Edition 6.25 of the Rocket Report! We hope all our readers had a peaceful holiday break. While many of us were enjoying time off work, launch companies like SpaceX kept up the pace until the final days of 2023. Last year saw a record level of global launch activity, with 223 orbital launch attempts and 212 rockets successfully reaching orbit. Nearly half of these missions were by SpaceX.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Firefly’s fourth launch puts payload in wrong orbit. The fourth flight of Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket on December 22 placed a small Lockheed Martin technology demonstration satellite into a lower-than-planned orbit after lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. US military tracking data indicated the Alpha rocket released its payload into an elliptical orbit ranging between 215 and 523 kilometers in altitude, not the mission’s intended circular target orbit. Firefly later confirmed the Alpha rocket’s second stage, which was supposed to reignite about 50 minutes after liftoff, did not deliver Lockheed Martin’s satellite into the proper orbit. This satellite, nicknamed Tantrum, was designed to test Lockheed Martin’s new wideband Electronically Steerable Antenna technology to demonstrate faster on-orbit sensor calibration to deliver rapid capabilities to US military forces.
Throwing a tantrum? … This was the third time in four flights that Firefly’s commercial Alpha rocket, designed to loft payloads up to a metric ton in mass, has not reached its orbital target. The first test flight in 2021 suffered an engine failure on the first stage before losing control shortly after liftoff. The second Alpha launch in 2022 deployed its satellites into a lower-than-planned orbit, leaving them unable to complete their missions. In September, Firefly launched a small US military satellite on a responsive launch demonstration. Firefly and the US Space Force declared that mission fully successful. Atmospheric drag will likely pull Lockheed Martin’s payload back into Earth’s atmosphere for a destructive reentry in a matter of weeks. The good news is ground teams are in contact with the satellite, so there could be a chance to complete at least some of the mission’s objectives. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
Australian startup nears first launch. The first locally made rocket to be launched into space from Australian soil is scheduled for liftoff from a commercial facility in Queensland early next year, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports. A company named Gilmour Space says it hopes to launch its first orbital-class Eris rocket in March, pending final approval from Australian regulatory authorities. This would be the first Australian-built orbital rocket, although a US-made rocket launched Australia’s first satellite from a military base in South Australia in 1967. The UK’s Black Arrow rocket also launched a satellite from the same remote Australian military base in 1971.
Getting to know Eris … The three-stage Eris rocket stands 25 meters (82 feet) tall with the ability to deliver up to 300 kilograms (660 pounds) of payload into low-Earth orbit, according to Gilmour Space. The company says the Eris rocket will be powered by Gilmour’s “new and proprietary hybrid rocket engine.” These kinds of propulsion systems use a solid fuel and a liquid oxidizer. We’ll be watching to see if Gilmour shares more tangible news about the progress toward the first Eris launch in March. In late 2022, the company targeted April 2023 for the first Eris flight, so this program has a history of delays. (submitted by Marzipan and Onychomys)
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A commander’s lament on the loss of a historic SpaceX booster. The Falcon 9 rocket that launched NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on SpaceX’s first crew mission in 2020 launched and landed for the 19th and final time just before Christmas, then tipped over on its recovery ship during the trip back to Cape Canaveral, Florida, Ars reports. This particular booster, known by the tail number B1058, was special among SpaceX’s fleet of reusable rockets. It was the fleet leader, having tallied 19 missions over the course of more than three-and-a-half years. More importantly, it was the rocket that thundered into space on May 30, 2020, on a flight that made history.
A museum piece? … The lower third of the booster was still on the deck of SpaceX’s recovery ship as it sailed into Port Canaveral on December 26. This portion of the rocket contains the nine Merlin engines and landing legs, some of which appeared mangled after the booster tipped over in high winds and waves. Hurley, who commanded SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft on the booster’s historic first flight in 2020, said he hopes to see the remaining parts of the rocket in a museum. “Hopefully they can do something because this is a little bit of an inauspicious way to end its flying career, with half of it down at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean,” said Hurley.
SpaceX opens 2024 campaign with a new kind of Starlink satellite. SpaceX has launched the first six Starlink satellites that will provide cellular transmissions for customers of T-Mobile and other carriers, Ars reports. A Falcon 9 rocket launched from California on January 2 carried 21 Starlink satellites overall, including the first six Starlinks with Direct to Cell capabilities. SpaceX says these satellites, and thousands of others to follow, will “enable mobile network operators around the world to provide seamless global access to texting, calling, and browsing wherever you may be on land, lakes, or coastal waters without changing hardware or firmware.” T-Mobile said that field testing of Starlink satellites with the T-Mobile network will begin soon. “The enhanced Starlink satellites have an advanced modem that acts as a cellphone tower in space, eliminating dead zones with network integration similar to a standard roaming partner,” SpaceX said.
Two of 144 … SpaceX followed this launch with another Falcon 9 flight from Florida on January 3 carrying a Swedish telecommunications satellite. These were the company’s first two missions of 2024, a year when SpaceX officials aim to launch up to 144 rockets, an average of 12 per month, exceeding the 98 rockets it launched in 2023. A big focus of SpaceX’s 2024 launch manifest will be delivering these Starlink Direct to Cell satellites into orbit. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
Chinese booster lands near homes. China added a new pair of satellites to its Beidou positioning and navigation system on December 25, but spent stages from the launch landed within inhabited areas, Space News reports. Meanwhile, a pair of the side boosters from the Long March 3B rocket used for the launch appeared to fall to the ground near inhabited areas in Guangxi region, downrange of the Xichang spaceport in Sichuan province, according to apparent bystander footage on Chinese social media. One video shows a booster falling within a forested area and exploding, while another shows a falling booster and later, wreckage next to a home.
Life downrange … Chinese government authorities reportedly issue warnings and evacuation notices for citizens living in regions where spent rocket boosters are likely to fall after launch, but these videos clearly show people are still close by as the rockets fall from the sky. We’ve seen this kind of imagery before, including views of a rocket that crashed into a rural building in 2019. What’s more, the rockets return to Earth with leftover toxic propellants—hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide—that could be deadly to breathe or touch. Clouds of brownish-orange gas are visible around the rocket wreckage, an indication of the presence of nitrogen tetroxide. China built its three Cold War-era spaceports in interior regions to protect them from possible military attacks, while its newest launch site is at a coastal location on Hainan Island, allowing rockets launched there to drop boosters into the sea. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)
Launch date set for next H3 test flight. The second flight of Japan’s new flagship H3 rocket is scheduled for February 14 (US time; February 15 in Japan), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency announced on December 28. This will come nearly one year after the first H3 test flight failed to reach orbit last March when the rocket’s second stage failed to ignite a few minutes after liftoff. This failure destroyed a pricey Japanese Earth observation satellite and dealt a setback to Japan’s rocket program. The H3 is designed to be cheaper and more capable than the H-IIA and H-IIB rockets it will replace. Eventually, the H3 will launch Japan’s scientific research probes, spy satellites, and commercial payloads.
Fixes since the first flight … Engineers narrowed the likely cause for the first H3 launch failure to an electrical issue, although Japanese officials have not provided an update on the investigation for several months. In August, Japan’s space agency said investigators had narrowed the cause of the H3’s second-stage malfunction to three possible failure scenarios. Nevertheless, officials are apparently satisfied the H3 is ready to fly again. But this time, there won’t be an expensive satellite aboard. A dummy payload will fly inside the H3 rocket’s nose cone, along with two relatively low-cost small satellites hitching a piggyback ride to orbit. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)
India’s PSLV launches first space mission of 2024. The first orbital launch of the new year, as measured in the globally recognized Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, was the flight of an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) on January 1 (December 31 in the United States). This launch deployed an X-ray astronomy satellite named XPoSat, which will measure X-ray emissions from black holes, neutron stars, active galactic nuclei, and pulsars. This is India’s first X-ray astronomy satellite, and its launch is another sign of India’s ascendence among the world’s space powers. India has some of the world’s most reliable launch vehicles, is developing a human-rated capsule to carry astronauts into orbit, and landed its first robotic mission on the Moon last year.
Going lower … After releasing the XPoSat payload, the PSLV’s fourth stage lowered its orbit to begin an extended mission hosting 10 scientific and technology demonstration experiments. These payloads will test new radiation shielding technologies, green propulsion, and fuel cells in orbit, according to the Indian Space Research Organization. On missions with excess payload capacity, India has started offering researchers and commercial companies the opportunity to fly experiments on the PSLV fourth stage, which has its own solar power source to essentially turn itself from a rocket into a satellite platform. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)
Mixed crews will continue flying to the International Space Station. NASA and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, will extend an agreement on flying each other’s crew members to the International Space Station through 2025, Interfax reports. This means SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft and Boeing’s Starliner capsule, once operational, will continue transporting Russian cosmonauts to and from the space station, as several recent SpaceX crew missions have done. In exchange, Russia will continue flying US astronauts on Soyuz missions.
There’s a good reason for this… Despite poor relations on Earth, the US and Russian governments continue to be partners on the ISS. While NASA no longer has to pay for seats on Soyuz spacecraft, the US space agency still wants to fly its astronauts on Soyuz to protect against the potential for a failure or lengthy delay with a SpaceX or Boeing crew mission. Such an event could lead to a situation where the space station has no US astronauts aboard. Likewise, Roscosmos benefits from this arrangement to ensure there’s always a Russian on the space station, even in the event of a problem with Soyuz. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
SpaceX sets new records to close out 2023. SpaceX launched two rockets, three hours apart, to wrap up a record-setting 2023 launch campaign, Ars reports. On December 28, SpaceX launched a Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida with the US military’s super-secret X-37B spaceplane. Less than three hours later, a Falcon 9 rocket took off a few miles to the south with another batch of Starlink Internet satellites. These were SpaceX’s final launches of 2023. SpaceX ended the year with 98 flights, including 91 Falcon 9s, five Falcon Heavy rockets, and two test launches of the giant new Super Heavy-Starship rocket. These flights were spread across four launch pads in Florida, California, and Texas. It was also the shortest turnaround between two SpaceX flights in the company’s history, and set a modern-era record at Cape Canaveral, Florida, with the shortest span between two orbital-class launches there since 1966.
Where’s the X-37B?… The military’s reusable X-37B spaceplane that launched on the Falcon Heavy rocket apparently headed into an unusually high orbit, much higher than the spaceplane program’s previous six flights. But the military kept the exact orbit a secret, and amateur skywatchers will be closely watching for signs of the spaceplane passing overhead in hopes of estimating its apogee, perigee, and inclination. What the spaceplane is doing is also largely a mystery. The X-37B resembles a miniature version of NASA’s retired space shuttle orbiter, with wings, deployable landing gear, and black thermal protection tiles to shield its belly from the scorching heat of reentry.
Elon Musk says SpaceX needs to built a lot of Starships. Even with reusability, SpaceX will need to build Starships as often as Boeing builds 737 jetliners in order to realize Elon Musk’s ambition for a Mars settlement, Ars reports. “To achieve Mars colonization in roughly three decades, we need ship production to be 100/year, but ideally rising to 300/year,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X. SpaceX still aims to make the Starship and its Super Heavy booster rapidly reusable. The crux is that the ship, the part that would travel into orbit, and eventually to the Moon or Mars, won’t be reused as often as the booster. These ships will come in a number of different configurations, including crew and cargo transports, refueling ships, fuel depots, and satellite deployers.
Laws of physics… The first stage of the giant launch vehicle, named Super Heavy, is designed to return to SpaceX’s launch sites about six minutes after liftoff, similar to the way SpaceX recovers its Falcon boosters today. Theoretically, Musk wrote, the booster could be ready for another flight in an hour. With the Starship itself, the laws of physics and the realities of geography come into play. As an object flies in low-Earth orbit, the Earth rotates underneath it. This means that a satellite, or Starship, will find itself offset some 22.5 degrees in longitude from its launch site after a single 90-minute orbit around the planet. It could take several hours, or up to a day, for a Starship in low-Earth orbit to line up with one of the recovery sites. “The ship needs to complete at least one orbit, but often several to have the ground track line back up with the launch site, so reuse may only be daily,” Musk wrote. “This means that ship production needs to be roughly an order of magnitude higher than booster production.”
Next three launches
January 5: Kuaizhou 1A | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 11: 20 UTC
January 7: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-35 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 21: 00 UTC
January 8: Falcon 9 | Starlink 7-10 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 05: 00 UTC
