Despite not having launched anything in more than five months, United Launch Alliance still expects to fly around 12 missions this year. But it’s still waiting on the Space Force to certify its new Vulcan rocket for national security launches.

Vulcan flew twice in 2024, but the second mission had a rough ride to space. Just after launch, one of the nozzles sheared off one the two attached solid rocket boosters provided by Northrop Grumman. The Vulcan’s main BE-4 engines, built by Blue Origin, were powerful enough to compensate for the booster damage on flight, but the event has been the primary culprit for the delay in certification.

“They have all the data. We’ve completed everything that you’re supposed to do. We’ve submitted that back last month,” said ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno on Wednesday during a media roundtable discussion. “Typically, it’s not a very long process in the past when vehicles are certified, so they have it.”

Bruno said the nozzle damage was due to a manufacturing defect that has since been corrected.

“We’re done and waiting now,” he said.

The Sentinel reached out to Space Systems Command within Space Force for an update on certification. In December, Col. James Horne with SSC’s Launch Execution Systems said he expected to be complete by January.

In the meantime, ULA unstacked a Vulcan rocket that was being prepped for launch at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station for the USSF-106 mission for the Space Force. That cleared the way so ULA could instead set up an Atlas V rocket for a commercial customer instead — the first of dozens of launches lined up for Amazon for its Project Kuiper constellation of internet satellites.

A date for that launch has not been set.

Bruno said he expects to be able to switch back to Vulcan and finally begin flying national security missions after this first Project Kuiper flight.

“I expect to fly around a dozen time now for the balance of the year,” he said. “I can fly more if satellites show up, and obviously, if there aren’t any satellites, we’ll fly less. But we have continued to build the rockets as we have been resolving the anomaly and awaiting certification.”

He says he has the rocket stages for nearly a dozen Atlas Vs and half a dozen Vulcans manufactured.

“I can’t bring them all to the Cape because there isn’t room to store them all there, but as many as will fit at the Cape are being transported there or already are there,” he said.

He also has dozens of solid rocket boosters already in Florida and 5 million pounds of propellant.

“So we’re all staged up and ready, and as spacecraft show up, we’ll be able to fly them,” he said.

By the end of 2025, he expects ULA to get into its tempo of about two launches per month setting up to hit at least 20 launches in 2026, which would carve into the company’s backlog of 70 missions among national security and commercial contracts.

ULA is a shared venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. It only had five launches in 2024, including the final mission of its Delta IV Heavy, and only three launches in 2023.

ULA has only 15 Atlas V rockets left, and eight are set aside for Project Kuiper, six for future launches of Boeing’s Starliner and one other lined up for a communications satellite for ViaSat.

Vulcan was designed to be the replacement for Atlas V and Delta IV rockets.

ULA has another 38 missions lined up for Project Kuiper on Vulcan as well, but the most lucrative launches will come from the 24 missions for the Department of Defense it had been awarded as part of the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 program.

Vulcan was years behind schedule when it made its debut launch in January 2024, but it performed extremely well. The followup launch didn’t occur until October 2024, and it flew without a paying customer with the primary goal of getting the second flight under its belt that is required by the Space Force to be certified for national security missions.

The $8.5 billion in NSSL Phase 2 contracts were doled out over five years beginning in 2020 to both ULA and SpaceX. All of ULA’s missions were supposed to have been on Vulcan.

The first two missions awarded to ULA were originally supposed to fly by the end of 2022. ULA only got the first of those up last summer, but only after switching to an Atlas V.

The other awarded in 2020 can’t fly until Vulcan is certified.

Meanwhile, ULA lost one of its other Phase 2 task orders, which was shifted and has already flown on SpaceX.

An Air Force report leaked to Bloomberg News this week stated ULA “has performed unsatisfactorily” in completing its obligations under the DOD contracts. The report also delved into the possibility of taking away ULA’s missions and give them to an “alternate provider.”

The alternate provider for now would be SpaceX.

Bruno took exception to the report, which he said was inaccurate at the time it was written, and even more so now in light of the pace of rocket and engine manufacturing since last year as well as ULA’s recent completion of the investigation into the errant booster nozzle on the last Vulcan launch.

“I don’t normally talk about improperly leaked reports, but I’m going to make it exception this time,” he said. “I’m just a little bit suspicious that this was improperly leaked at this moment in time as I wait for my certification.”

ULA’s potential payout for its remaining 25 missions under contract is near $4.5 billion, while SpaceX has 23 of the task orders worth more than $4 billion.

“In our business, if you don’t fly, you don’t get paid,” he said. “And so we have not flown for them yet this year, so we’re not getting those payments.”

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