by By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Much is riding on the first launch of the new Vulcan rocket by the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
A successful launch at Cape Canaveral would allow ULA to fulfill a large backlog of missions worth hundreds of millions of dollars and establish a better competitive base with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
And it could be crucial to the two US aerospace firms’ plans to sell their joint venture.
“It’s a very nervous time for them,” said George Sowers, ULA’s former chief scientist, who was instrumental in the creation of Vulcan. “It really is the future of their company.”
The long-awaited milestone was the first mission after months of various delays on the final piece of Vulcan development, and after last year’s test disaster with Vulcan’s advanced booster. ULA CEO Tory Bruno said Vulcan performed well during recent ground tests.
“That’s an extremely complex machine, it’s extremely powerful. Everything has to work,” Bruno said Saturday at the Vulcan launch pad. “Flying a rocket is always critical. But what we’re good at is managing that risk.”
The mission checklist includes a lunar lander that aims to make the first US lunar landing in half a century. The rocket will use for the first time engines supplied by Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company.
The Vulcan launch also comes as Boeing and Lockheed, which formed ULA in a 2006 merger of their rocket programs, are looking to sell the jointly owned venture, according to three people familiar with the talks.
The talks have been a complicated, drawn-out process that could have critical implications for the Vulcan launch, said the sources, who asked not to be identified.
ULA declined to comment on any talk of potential deals. Bruno has already said that his company may be ripe for acquisition.
Boeing and Lockheed declined to comment.
The launch of Vulcan, scheduled for 2:18 a.m. ET (0718 GMT) Monday, is the result of a year-long development effort that stemmed primarily from ULA’s need to replace its current Atlas V rocket. That rocket’s Russian-imported engines drew criticism from lawmakers that led to plans to retire it.
The retirement of Atlas – as well as another Vulcan rocket, Delta – will leave the 200-foot-tall (60-m) Vulcan to handle a multitude of lucrative missions and become the company’s sole competitor to SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9.
The initial Vulcan mission will send a privately built lander from space robotics firm Astrobotic to the moon. But the launch itself will also serve as the first of two certification flights required by US Space before Vulcan can fly the Pentagon’s satellites.
Space Force is a key customer for Vulcan—the military branch in 2020 selected ULA’s Vulcan and the retiring Atlas V to fly 60% of the Pentagon’s missions around 2027.
Priced lower than its predecessors at around $110 million per launch, Vulcan will look to regain market share from Falcon 9, priced at around $62 million per launch. SpaceX’s cheaper flights have ended ULA’s decade-long dominance of government satellite launches.
Vulcan will also compete with Blue Origin’s upcoming New Glenn rocket, which uses the same engines as Vulcan.
CAPACITY EXPENDITURES
Acquisition talks for ULA have been ongoing for more than a year, and the sources have shown interest from dozens of firms, including Blue Origin.
Blue Origin did not respond to a request for comment.
The rationale and timing of Boeing and Lockheed’s sale of ULA is unclear. But the US space industry has undergone significant changes since ULA was founded in 2006, when it was created to dominate government launches and meet some of the commercial demands of the then-emerging satellite market.
The growth of the commercial market has been slower than expected, said Richard McKinney, an aerospace consultant and former director of the Air Force’s space acquisition unit until 2007. “But it looks like we’re there now.”
Amazon’s planned Kuiper network is set to bring in critical launch revenue for ULA. That helped supply Vulcan with a multibillion-dollar backlog of about 70 missions split evenly between government and commercial customers, Bruno said.
The development of Vulcan and ULA’s transition from its Atlas and Delta rockets have made it difficult to estimate the company’s valuation, but analysts estimate it could be between $2 billion and $3 billion.
Boeing and Lockheed have their own competitive space units. Lockheed, among other activities, has taken up the construction of lunar rovers and made strategic investments in ABL Space, a small-launch startup with plans to build larger rockets in the future.
Boeing’s space program is struggling, primarily with its long-delayed Starliner space capsule, which competes with SpaceX’s more established Crew Dragon. Troubles with Starliner development have cost Boeing about $1.5 billion since 2014.
New ownership could allow ULA to innovate beyond the launch sector in ways its corporate parents were unwilling to allow, said former ULA chief scientist Sowers.
“The company’s charter was set, and it was very limited,” he said. “They’re always competing and they couldn’t agree on anything. We weren’t allowed to innovate.”
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; editing by Ben Klayman, Rosalba O’Brien and Leslie Adler)
