Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

ULA aiming to debut new Vulcan rocket on Christmas Eve

Trevor Mogg
By
ULA's Vulcan Certification-1 (Cert-1) rocket sits atop Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral in Florida.
ULA’s Vulcan Certification-1 (Cert-1) rocket sits atop Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral in Florida. ULA

SpaceX tends to get all the headlines when it comes to rockets, but United Launch Alliance (ULA) has been in the game almost just as long (it was formed in 2006, four years after SpaceX), sending satellites to orbit for a range of customers across national security, civil, and commercial markets.

This week it offered an update on the Vulcan Centaur, the successor to its Atlas V and Delta IV rockets. The Vulcan’s maiden flight — called Cert-1 (short for Certification-1) — is currently scheduled for December 24 from Cape Canaveral in Florida, launching Astrobotic Technology’s Peregrine lander to the lunar surface.

Recommended Videos

ULA said on Monday that the Vulcan rocket is beginning final processing activities ahead of the inaugural launch on Christmas Eve. These include a wet dress rehearsal where the rocket’s launch systems and procedures are put through their paces, spacecraft integration, and then final processing in preparation for launch.

Related

“This launch begins a new era for ULA and for the country,” Tory Bruno, ULA’s president and CEO, said in a message released on Monday. “Vulcan satisfies all challenging orbital requirements essential for U.S. national defense and provides one scalable system for all missions while continuing to provide unmatched reliability and orbital precision.”

The Vulcan’s core stage is powered by two BE-4 engines built by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, a company also known for its short tourism rides to the edge of space and which is developing a lander for future crew and cargo missions to the moon.

Assuming the Cert-1 mission goes according to plan, ULA plans to send the Vulcan to orbit again in the Cert-2 mission in early 2024.

Spaceflight companies are developing new rockets all the time. France-based Arianespace, for example, is readying Ariane 6 for its maiden flight next year, while New Zealand firm Rocket Lab is working on the Neutron rocket that could one day carry human crew. And then there’s SpaceX, which is hoping to send its mighty Super Heavy rocket and Starship rocket — collectively known as the Starship — on its second test flight in the coming months following a failed flight in April.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
How astronomers used James Webb to detect methane in the atmosphere of an exoplanet
An artists rendering of a blue and white exoplanet known as WASP-80 b, set on a star-studded black background. Alternating horizontal layers of cloudy white, grey and blue cover the planets surface. To the right of the planet, a rendering of the chemical methane is depicted with four hydrogen atoms bonded to a central carbon atom, representing methane within the exoplanet's atmosphere. An artist’s rendering of the warm exoplanet WASP-80 b whose color may appear bluish to human eyes due to the lack of high-altitude clouds and the presence of atmospheric methane identified by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, similar to the planets Uranus and Neptune in our own solar system.

One of the amazing abilities of the James Webb Space Telescope is not just detecting the presence of far-off planets, but also being able to peer into their atmospheres to see what they are composed of. With previous telescopes, this was extremely difficult to do because they lacked the powerful instruments needed for this kind of analysis, but scientists using Webb recently announced they had made a rare detection of methane in an exoplanet atmosphere.

Scientists studied the planet WASP-80 b using Webb's NIRCam instrument, which is best known as a camera but also has a slitless spectroscopy mode which allows it to split incoming light into different wavelengths. By looking at which wavelengths are missing because they have been absorbed by the target, researchers can tell what an object -- in this case, a planetary atmosphere -- is composed of.

Read more
Juice spacecraft gears up for first ever Earth-moon gravity boost
Artist's impression of ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) approaching Earth.

The European Space Agency (ESA)'s Juice mission is heading to Jupiter, but it isn't traveling all that way in a straight line. Instead, like most solar system missions, the spacecraft makes use of the gravity of other planets to give it a push on its way.

But Juice will be making an unusual maneuver next year, carrying out the first gravity assist flyby around both Earth and the moon. This week, the spacecraft made its longest maneuver yet to get into position ahead of the first of its kind flyby in 2024.

Read more
Super high energy particle falls to Earth; its source is a mystery
Artist’s illustration of ultra-high-energy cosmic ray astronomy to clarify extremely energetic phenomena.

Researchers have detected one of the highest-energy particles ever falling to Earth. Cosmic rays are high-energy particles that come from sources in space such as the sun, but this recent detection is more powerful than anything that can be explained by known sources in our galaxy or even beyond. The particle had an energy of 2.4 x 1020eV, which is millions of times the energy of the particles produced in a particle collider.

Artist’s illustration of ultra-high-energy cosmic ray astronomy to clarify extremely energetic phenomena. Osaka Metropolitan University/Kyoto University/Ryuunosuke Takeshige

Read more