United Launch Alliance may seek certification from the Space Force after one flight.
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Vulcan’s second launch likely to be delayed until at least September
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If I had to guess what to do in that situation, I would go bang on Kuiper door and ask if they have something, anything to launch. ULA already screwed them over with Vulcan, they can be nice now and do a free lift of 2, 5 or 10 Kuiper sats to test.
EDIT:
This is from December 1st 2023. If they are planning to begin deployment in H1 2024, they probably can be convinced to launch something on July 2024 on Vulcan.
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I'm totally surprised that ULA doesn't have a couple of option payloads sitting aroung waiting for this situation. Even with the BE-4 being a gating item here, I find it amusing they also have to wait on the payload. Just launch something, like maybe another astrobotic lander?
Or are they trying to fly somehing in the largest fairing they have to prove that they can do all the staging steps properly? In that case, just launch with a dummy load, how hard can it be to set one up?
Or are they trying to fly somehing in the largest fairing they have to prove that they can do all the staging steps properly? In that case, just launch with a dummy load, how hard can it be to set one up?
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Simply my opinion, but I think that dummy payload is an "easier" decision for a private company, a company looking to get in on the gov contract and/or a company in the middle of innovate approaches to space.
They would be more willing to bite the bullet, if you will, and do the dummy payload, take the potential profit lose to show that they are ready.
One the other hand, you have some companies that are so used to public/government dollars - they are loathe to spend a single dime of their own money.
A dummy payload on a ULA rocket is a lost profit opportunity. A month's long delay must be better than the dummy payload option according to their accounting team.
Or so it would seem to me..
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This explains quite a bit for me. All indications that I've heard have been that Dream Chaser is moving into the last phase of testing (thermal vacuum testing), which should mean we would be hearing noise about launch preparations... and the fact that we haven't heard anything of the sort was raising some flags.
But if BE-4s aren't available for the launch vehicle, Dream Chaser still has a bunch of stuff left to complete even after testing, and the ISS schedule doesn't have an opening for them to arrive until the fall in any case... That makes the radio silence about the upcoming launch a lot more understandable.
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100 million of pure cost is not a small amount, not even for a rocket company.
I can well imagine they’d love to share some of that cost.
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Given ULA's very good track record and that Cert-1 seemed to go quite well, I think the Space Force could launch something on flight two and not regret it. It may not be what the contract says, and the contract should be adhered to, but in terms of confidence that it'll work? Pretty high.
Would still want to pick a cheap-ish payload though.
Would still want to pick a cheap-ish payload though.
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When the vehicle wasn’t ready, they blamed the customer and bragged they’d launch a dummy if need be.
When they took a billion dollar development subsidy, they claimed it was all new innovative, never before seen stuff.
When they have to demonstrate actual launches, it’s suddenly a barely changed Atlas that should just be waved through verification.
When they took a billion dollar development subsidy, they claimed it was all new innovative, never before seen stuff.
When they have to demonstrate actual launches, it’s suddenly a barely changed Atlas that should just be waved through verification.
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Gr oh servir os quicio mi pegado. Servicio en es se saludado sufrirla entonces provecho proximos. Reinaba uso asiduos hoguera iba. Si monja no bajos tisis carta nuevo. Excedido ola admirada una tresillo gas esa. Pano otro paje cosa unas el leer ni. Relaciones ahogandose continuare pedantesca lo ex oh gr. Es un al reintegra levantaba contemplo nuncasuna ha recibidos mayuscula. Allegros hablaban afrodita don encogido asi
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There is one company that has satellites ready to go all the time. Simple solution, go to SpaceX and offer to launch a big batch of Starlink satelites for less than it costs SpaceX to launch a Falcon 9.
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I don't know if I agree with your assessment on ULA screwing over Kuiper. The Centaur explosion certainly delayed Vulcan, but the lack of BE-4 engine availability from BO had already resulted in years of delays to Vulcan and its missions. And apparently BO still doesn't have engine production where it needs to be. As for Kuiper ... I don't even know if they have satellites to launch yet. If they do, I wonder why they aren't loading up an Atlas or Vulcan already? And if they don't have satellites ready, then I'd argue that Centaur's explosion really didn't impact their ability to start launching the constellation.
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If that 14-flight option means no paperwork, I'd go for that. Damn the expense!
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For certain companies, any amount of paperwork is easier than finding customers for 14 launches without relying on defense contracts.
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Yeah this was my thought as well. There is massive demand from constellations just go that route
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Until they are not certified and miss out on some government launches because they don’t get another launch soon enough. They could end up in the same place as Boeing with SpaceX as DOD re-arranges the launch split to favor the company that is actually certified to launch.
After all, it isn’t a month delay, more like three to six months.
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It will soon turn into "May we please have more engines, pretty please, if you don't mind, dear wonderful boss?"
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Isn't ULA on the market? I thought I heard that BO was buying them. Not likely Boeing could come up with the money, they have their own problems.
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I am also a bit surprised that ULA is still waiting on engines from Blue Origin, I had seen people post convincing arguments that that problem was solved. I am also surprised ULA didn't have a backup payload, since I thought they said they did.
Another argument for ULA to buy BO, since I don't think there are antitrust concerns any more for a rocket maker owning the capability to build their own rocket engines, unlike aircraft makers back in the day. . .
Another argument for ULA to buy BO, since I don't think there are antitrust concerns any more for a rocket maker owning the capability to build their own rocket engines, unlike aircraft makers back in the day. . .
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Reading this article I forgot first launch even happened. Maybe I’m getting it confused with Starliner.
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So far the BE-4 engines used for the qualification trials and as the flight engines on CERT-1 have been largely hand built. Blue Origin has not yet demonstrated the ability to mass produce BE-4s in a manner similar to how SpaceX produces Merlins and Raptors.
That being said, I am surprised they are already having issues. I had expected BO would be able to deliver the engines for CERT-2. I did not expect the bottleneck to show itself this early. I thought the problem would be further down the road, when ULA starts launching Kuiper satellites and tried to ramp up their launch cadence. Another potential long term issue will be when BO starts testing New Glenn and needs additional BE-4s for that.
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Imagine if they weren't dumping the first state and the BE-4 engines into the ocean on each flight. There are many ways to solve supply chain bottlenecks...
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The delay from Vulcan made Kupier waste one of the Atlas flights that they had hired to launch just 2 Kuiper sats that were going to be launched with Astrobotic.
Yeah, forced to waste a full Atlas launch on 2 test sats is kind of screwed.
BO is a separated company from Amazon. So any problems caused by BO shouldn't be paid by Kuiper.
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I don't understand the problem.
Wasn't Vulcan having a large manifest of flights already?
Why wait for Dream Chaser if they can launch other commercial customers in the meantime?
Like Kuiper satellites, for example?
Wasn't Vulcan having a large manifest of flights already?
Why wait for Dream Chaser if they can launch other commercial customers in the meantime?
Like Kuiper satellites, for example?
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My point isn't that OB and Amazon are the same, just that BO is the one responsible for the bulk of the delay. In fact, IIRC the new Centaur upper stage wouldn't have been a gating factor if the BE-4s were delivered earlier, and if those two weren't flown with Astrobotic, that's Astrobotic's fault.
Regardless, we're sitting here well into 2024 and they have plenty of rockets sitting in storage ready to go. Why aren't they launching their constellation yet?
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This makes me wonder how many BE-4 engines are actually on their way to ULA. I don’t detect any real sense of urgency from ULA. Seems they just want to be green-lighted to launch an NRO payload when two BE-4s do arrive.
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A little while ago when there was a flurry of New Glenn publicity, one of the points that was loudly repeated was that the 7 BE-4s for NG were stated to be in either in testing or delivered, and those commenters took that as proof that BE-4 production was a solved problem, and would no longer cause delays. Of course, Vulcan and NG use different variants of the BE-4, and we still have seen no evidence of either being produced at scale.
AFAICT, their backlog is mostly US govt launches and Kuiper launches. Nothing ready to fly now.
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Vulcan's flight manifest is almost solely DoD missions and Kuiper missions. They can't launch DoD missions until they get certified, and they need to successfully fly 1 more time to do this.
And it seems the Kuiper satellites are not ready yet. Remember, Amazon also booked the remaining Atlas V launches for Kuiper. If Kuiper satellites were ready to deploy, we would be seeing Atlas Vs launching them. And a few months back, Amazon burned an Atlas V launch for just 2 Kuiper prototypes. This only used a fraction of the Atlas V's capacity. If there were any other Kuiper satellites other than those 2 prototypes ready, they could have launched then.
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Vulcan is firmly in the medium lift range until you put 4 or 6 solids on it. The VC2 that launched the Astrobotic lander could put 16 t to ISS, which is the same as F9 with a recovered booster.
Those payloads aren't uncommon, although finding one that is both ready to go on Vulcan's timeline and willing to ride a second flight of a new rocket might be challenging.
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Love that I learn so much on these threads.
https://tfaws.nasa.gov/TFAWS10/Proceedings/Interdisciplinary/Michael McCullar.pdf
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I don't think that'd help with this launch, though. Even if they'd included a SMART reuse demo into Cert-1 (the Peregrine launch), the recovered engines would probably have been torn apart and every little piece examined, rather than being in any condition to be reused for Cert-2.
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14 flights requires 28x BE-4 engines. With that sort of time scale, Kuiper payloads become an option but I am not convinced the military will wait that long.
I have been joking that two different rockets to assure access to space would be Falcon + Starship. If ULA needed 14 flights for certification then I would start looking at RocketLab, Stoke and Firefly. Perhaps one of them will consider doing a heavy launch vehicle.
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Remember previous Ars reporting of when Blue had brought in consultants to examine the company processes and found that there were major issues in accounting for costs and complexity of manufacturing process, with design decisions being made with no consideration of how difficult it would make it to produce.
So I'm not really surprised they are struggling to mass produce the engines.
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They would also be down an entire rocket considering it doesn't come back to land for another mission.
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