The 200-foot Vulcan Centaur rocket took to the skies for its second test flight, making a nominal flight save for a problem with one of its solid rocket boosters that contaminated the early morning launch.
United Launch Alliance (ULA) launched its heavy-lift rocket on Friday at 7:25 a.m. ET from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The launch was delayed almost an hour due to a problem that interrupted the pre-launch countdown with seven minutes left on the clock, ULA wrote in X.
The rocket still managed to lift off during its three-hour launch window, reaching a preliminary Earth orbit where it glided for 15 minutes to collect data on Vulcan’s performance. The flight was largely a success, but the rocket experienced a problem about 35 seconds after liftoff when a plume of material suddenly appeared be coming out of one of its two thrusters.
ULA initially did not acknowledge the issue during the live webcast, but company CEO Tory Bruno brought it up after the second engine fire. “We had an observation about SRB [solid rocket booster] number one, so we will be investigating that once the mission is completed,” Bruno said during the webcast, SpaceNews reported. “Other than that, the flight was nominal.”
The Cert-2 mission is the second certification flight for the rocket, the primary goal of which is for the U.S. Space Force to certify Vulcan for national security missions. If certified, the rocket will carry two US military payloads to orbit this year.
The mission was initially supposed to carry Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spaceplane, but the experimental vehicle was not yet ready to take off. Under pressure from Vulcan’s busy schedule, ULA decided to launch its rocket with a mass simulator (a dummy payload) and other instruments, making data collection the sole purpose of the Cert-2 mission. The rocket’s first test flight in January launched Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander to the Moon.
Since there were no paying customers in Cert-2, ULA absorbed the entire cost of the launch. Now that the rocket has completed its second test flight, the certification process will still take a few weeks, giving the Space Force time to review the launch data. For the most part, the rocket was successful in its mission, but that brief booster failure could cause the Space Force to take more time to analyze the launch data, or could even require a third test flight. That certainly would not be the result the ULA expected.
Vulcan is a mostly expendable heavy-lift launch vehicle that was first conceived in 2006, borrowing design elements from ULA’s Atlas V and Delta IV rockets. With Vulcan, ULA hopes to compete with industry giant SpaceX, giving the growing space market more viable options for reaching orbit.
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