United Launch Alliance (ULA) has confirmed that the final Delta flight will take place at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on March 28, bringing to a close six decades of service by the reliable family of rockets.
The Colorado-based spaceflight company revealed the news in a post on social media on Tuesday.
The 16th and final mission of the Delta IV Heavy will deploy an intelligence satellite into a geostationary orbit for the National Reconnaissance Office.
“The dependable Delta — one of the pillars in American rocketry for 60+ years — is preparing for its final mission that will carry a national security payload to serve and protect the U.S. and our allies,” ULA said in an online post:
The dependable Delta — one of the pillars in American rocketry for 60+ years — is preparing for its final mission that will carry a national security payload to serve and protect the U.S. and our allies.
#DeltaIVHeavy #NROL70 preview: https://t.co/7HC1Opbp20#TheDeltaFinale pic.twitter.com/43fvzKPxz4— ULA (@ulalaunch) March 12, 2024
The Delta IV Heavy, which first flew in 2004, features three boosters and resembles SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy vehicle, which uses three Falcon 9 rockets for the extra power required to deploy payloads to a higher orbit.
ULA, which since 2006 has been a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, closed its Delta assembly line in Alabama in June last year after producing the 389th and final Delta rocket.
The first successful Delta launch took place in 1960, carrying a communications satellite into orbit for NASA. ULA has been gradually ending flights for other rockets in the Delta family, including the Delta IV Medium, a single-booster vehicle that launched for the 29th and final time in 2019.
The Delta IV Heavy — and also the Atlas V — is being replaced by ULA’s Vulcan Centaur rocket, which launched on its maiden mission from the Kennedy Space Center in January. The new Vulcan rocket powered the commercial Peregrine spacecraft toward the moon, and while the rocket launch itself was flawless, the Peregrine suffered a propellant leak early on in the mission and failed to reach the lunar surface.
ULA’s schedule is already packed with at least 70 Vulcan missions, many of them for the Pentagon and for Amazon’s internet-from-space Kuiper project, which is expected to rival SpaceX’s Starlink service. To cope with the demand, ULA has spent time expanding its Alabama factory to increase production of its new Vulcan rocket.
