21 thoughts on “ULA’s Woes”

  1. All this time, through all of its difficulties, I’ve assumed that ULA was safe to survive through the early 2030’s, since it has such a big manifest (about 70 launches) for Vulcan on its books.

    But this is starting to sound serious enough to put that in jeopardy. The Defense Department is a big chunk of that manifest.

    SpaceX’s strategy to vertically integrate its space architectures to the maximum extent possible looks vindicated yet again.

    1. One also cannot discount the risk that the other large chunk of that thus-far Vulcan manifest could go away. That would be the launches slated for Amazon Leo. Besides handing ULA a big chunk of the total Leo launch manifest, Amazon also kicked in much of the money it took to build out a second Vertical Assembly Facility at SLC-41 to allow a potential doubling of cadence. If ULA and NorGrum can’t get pending issues squared away fairly soon, Amazon may have no real choice but to acquire still more launches from SpaceX in addition to the three already flown and the 10 additional ones that were recently contracted for. That, even more than military launches switched to SpaceX – and perhaps to Blue Origin within a year – could spell an early end to ULA.

      1. It’s a good point, but Elbon has been chatting up the prospect that ULA will be launching Amazon Leo missions starting this summer, since Amazon isn’t affected by the USSF suspension of NSSL launches on Vulcan, and, presumably, Amazon is less risk averse (and more desperate to launch!) than the Pentagon is.

        Perhaps so. But if there’s another “observation” on an SRB on one of those launches, even Amazon may step back and reassess.

        Right now, Northrop and ULA are only batting .833 on their SRBs so far — 2 out of 12 have had nozzle failures. On that batting average, a Vulcan-Centaur VC6 is likely to see at least one SRB failure. They have to figure out the root cause and fix this fast, because they’re running out of runway here, quickly.

        1. Yes. ULA and NorGrum have quite limited maneuvering room. If they can’t start cranking out “observation”-free Vulcan launch missions pretty soon it may not be only ULA on the Pentagon chopping bock. NorGrum has the contract for the next generation of US ICBMs. The War Department is not going to tolerate GEM 63XL levels of reliability for those.

  2. Everything we’ve come to expect from Boeing….and Lockmart isn’t looking too good either

  3. 6 GEM 63-XLs could be replaced by 15 SpaceX Merlin engines, arranged as a 5 foot thick, 71 foot tall hoop that surrounds the Vulcan’s core. The engines would be spaced about eight feet apart.

    The question would be how you land it, and whether it would really be a Falcon 15 with a weird methalox second stage and cryogenic third stage, and how they could ever make money throwing away an RL-10 per mission.

    1. Another Grade AAA Modest Proposal – Vulcan being literally surrounded and squeezed by SpaceX instead of just metaphorically.

  4. According to this, a burn through this time:
    https://spaceflightnow.com/2026/02/12/vulcan-suffers-solid-rocket-booster-problem-during-ussf-87-launch/
    for the second time, while according to this, the nozzle fell off from a manufacturing defect:
    https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/us-space-force-pauses-national-security-launches-on-ula-vulcan-rocket-due-to-booster-glitch

    Neither is a good look. Somebody needs to explain just what the big advantage of SRB’s is. They seem to combine massive cost with just being terribly heavy, large, hard to transport and assemble and serious risk. Been there, done that, have the memorials to prove it.

    They had margin to complete the mission, but I wonder how much was planning and how much was luck. Apparently Space Force isn’t feeling lucky.

    1. Somebody needs to explain just what the big advantage of SRB’s is.

      Well, it’s worth keeping in mind that ULA has had 155 launches to date — of which only one was a partial failure — and most of those launches have featured GEM solid rocket boosters. That one partial failure was the inaugural launch of Delta IV Heavy, which of course did not have any SRB’s.

      But somehow, what was once a very reliable GEM family of boosters is no longer very reliable, and it is worth asking just why that is. The NG Promontory plant has seen the retirement of a lot of its legacy workforce, and there’s speculation that there’s been a real dropoff in skills as a result.

      (Also worth noting: Ariane 5 had 2 failures and 3 partial failures in 117 launches, and none of those five failures involved the P241/P238 solid rocket boosters.)

      Stepping back, one could say that there was a time when SRBs were a decent and usually reliable way of customizing launch configurations to payloads. But the SpaceX model of highly vertically integrated purely liquid propelled EELVs has proven to be a superior model even before they got into regular recovery and reuse of the booster, and it is pretty telling that all of the new commercial launchers in development have basically adopted *that* model, rather than the legacy launch model.

      1. P.S. Obviously there is an asterisk on those two Vulcan launches, but they do technically count as successes, since the payloads got where they were meant to go. But the point is, before Vulcan, ULA had a pretty darned good track record for reliability. Very expensive, yes, and very slow to innovate or adapt, but they *were* reliable, if they were nothing else.

    2. “ Neither is a good look. Somebody needs to explain just what the big advantage of SRB’s is.”

      They did it for flexibility. Need to launch a fairly lightweight payload? Just use a Vulcan without any solids. Need to launch a heavier payload? Just add 2, 4, or 6 solids depending on your needs. The Vulcan core stays the same. This is much less expensive than developing a different rocket for each payload capacity requirement.

      1. Makes sense but there is also the rule that times N increases the chances for failure as well. We see that with SuperHeavy but it was designed to deal with small N failures. Vulcan seems to survive partial N failure. But a single full up N failure?

        1. They had two of what I guess would be the mildest survivable failures. There was a Delta II that was destroyed back in 1997 by a solid rocket failure.

          But I think the real issue is that solids are never going to get cheap because solid rocket propellant is expensive and will forever remain expensive. So even if you recover the motor casings, they still wouldn’t be competitive outside of the old pre-SpaceX commercial market and customers willing to pay thousands per pound to LEO.

          So I would say the use of solids guarantees market failure as competition centered on re-usability continues to drive prices downward. It’s just a question of when they throw in the towel on expendables and expendables with solid strap ons.

          Anyway, I rethought my Kerbal with 15 Merlins, and realized that simply using two Falcon 9 boosters would turn Vulcan into a Falcon Heavy with a methalox core and a Centaur upper stage, which is probably the ideal configuration for squeezing maximum performance out of that basic architecture, and maximizes the required complexity of both the ground equipment and the contractual agreements.

          1. So Vulcan doing a perp walk on each heavy-lift mission with a SpaceX-badged Officer Friendly on each side. Interesting. But ULA would need SLC-37 at Canaveral and SLC-6 at Vandy back and that ain’t happening.

          2. Nope. The time to jump on board with the idea was eight years ago, when Falcon Heavy first flew.

            A Delta IV medium (no side boosters) cost about $160 million a launch, whereas a Delta IV Heavy cost $350 to $400 million. It couldn’t compete with Falcon and was phased out. A pair of re-usable Falcon 9 side boosters might have at least given it a better price point.

            And NASA has looked into the old F-1 as a way to switch to RP-1/LOX strap ons for SLS,though nothing every came of it. Obviously such a side booster wouldn’t be re-usable because there’s no way to land using a couple of F-1 engines.

            It’s irritating, but at least the Chinese are okay with just copying whatever SpaceX does, simply because it works and nobody can beat them on price using legacy hardware.

          3. Ah, yes, that Pyrios thing for SLS.

            It might have been technically possible, but not economically or politically feasible. Aerojet-Rocketdyne, as it was then, would have had to scratch-build a new production line as all of the legacy tooling was scrapped when it made its move a mile eastward some years ago. Given the eye-watering price of the new, expendable RS-25s, one can only tremble at the prospect of what the price tag on each re-engineered F-1 would have been.

            And then there’s the matter of losing the Utah Congressional delegation as part of the SLS Caucus.

            For both good and bad reasons I don’t think Pyrios ever really had a chance.

    3. I always thought SRBs was a way for the US to continue to test and develop solid rocket fuels for the ballistic missile program. I realize there are other practical uses other than on-demand missile programs, but I don’t know those uses that can’t be done better with liquid fuel rockets, and I understand liquid fuel rockets are poor on-demand missiles.

      1. That’s always been the excuse anyway.

        Solid propellants are probably safe bets for small tactical missiles going forward, but maybe not for bigger tactical missiles or even ICBMs. There’s a startup called Galadyne headed by a former SpaceX-er that is looking to build large tactical missiles using room-temperature-storable liquid propellants that are not hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide. If this works for missiles in the ATACMS-to-THAAD size range there’s no obvious reason it wouldn’t work just as well for ICBMs and even SLBMs.

  5. Henry Spencer used to say that solids were a branch of fireworks, not spaceflight.
    I agree.
    Need more payload? Just build a bigger rocket to begin with.
    The Brits made the mistake in the 1950’s and 60’s of optimising their airliners for one customer which resulted in wider market failure.

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