United Launch Alliance, a space launch company, has postponed the first flight of its new rocket, Vulcan, by at least a month. The rocket will be ready by mid-April, but the main cargo, a lunar lander built by Astrobotic Technology, can only launch at certain times each month. The earliest opportunity will be on May 4th.
ULA had originally
planned to launch in late March. In addition to the lunar lander, the rocket
will carry test satellites for Amazon.com's Kuiper project and a memorial
payload for Celestis. ULA's CEO, Tory Bruno, believes the timeline for Vulcan's
launch can still be met.
The CEO of United Launch
Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, said he is
confident that the cargo for their new rocket, Vulcan, will be ready for
launch. ULA has been working on Vulcan for almost eight years as a replacement
for its Atlas V vehicle, which uses a Russian engine.
The new rocket
will allow ULA to cut ties with a foreign adversary and use an American-made
engine instead. ULA is a major launch provider for the Department of Defense.
They began developing the Vulcan after concerns arose about the Atlas V engine
in 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea.
In 2018, United
Launch Alliance chose an engine called the BE-4 for their Vulcan rocket. The
BE-4 engine was made by Blue Origin, a company owned by Jeff Bezos. The same
engine will also be used in Blue Origin's future New Glenn rocket. Two BE-4
engines will be used at the base of the Vulcan rocket to help it reach Earth's
orbit. This decision means that the United States will no longer have to rely
on Russian engines.
The engine for the
new Vulcan rocket has been delayed for many years. Blue Origin and ULA planned
for it to be ready in 2019, but it wasn't until late last year that the first
flight-ready engines were delivered. There's still more testing to do before
the launch, and ULA will bring the rocket to the launch pad soon. The company
paused testing for a bit to investigate some issues with the engines'
performance.
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