(Bloomberg) -- United Launch Alliance’s long-awaited Vulcan rocket lifted off on Monday, heralding a new era for the longtime Pentagon contractor fighting to expand market share against Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The Vulcan booster, which will compete against SpaceX’s dominant Falcon family and other heavy-lift rockets, blasted off at 2:18 a.m. local time from Florida’s Cape Canaveral.
Vulcan’s mission is set to last roughly four-and-a-half hours. About 50 minutes after liftoff, the rocket deployed a robotic lunar lander called Peregrine by the Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic Technology Inc., putting it en route to touch down on the moon in late February.
Developed with NASA, Peregrine could be the first privately made lander to successfully land on the moon. After deploying Peregrine, the rocket will put a payload that includes the cremated remains of Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, and actors from the series for the company Celestis in a deep-space orbit around the sun.
A successful mission will help prove that Vulcan is ready to start launching government and commercial payloads more regularly. Vulcan is also helping fuel takeover offers for United Launch Alliance. Among them is said to be a multi-billion-dollar bid from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin LLC, which supplies Vulcan’s two main BE-4 engines.
Vulcan’s launch is roughly a decade in the making, borne out of geopolitical tension after Russia invaded Crimea in 2014. ULA, a joint venture between Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., came under fire at the time since its legacy workhorse rocket, the Atlas V, runs on Russian-made engines. In response to Congressional pressure, the company decided to develop Vulcan as a cheaper, all-American alternative, using Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine.
ULA also hopes Vulcan will transition the company from primarily a government contractor to a rocket maker with a more diverse set of customers. The rocket also aims to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, which has held something of a de facto monopoly on the launch market as other rockets have gone offline or stalled in development.
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Originally set to launch as early as 2019, Vulcan suffered developmental delays getting to the launchpad. Perhaps the biggest setback stemmed from late delivery of the rocket’s BE-4 engines, which arrived for this flight in late 2022. ULA suffered another major delay when a part of the rocket used for development blew up during a test.
Plenty of eyes are on this mission, especially at the Pentagon. This first flight, along with Vulcan’s second flight planned tentatively for some time in the first half of 2024, will be used to certify the rocket for launching national security satellites. ULA is on the hook for more than two dozen flights for the Department of Defense over the next few years. ULA will also be able to start competing for NASA launch contracts with Vulcan following a successful first flight.
While ULA’s priority client has long been the US government, Vulcan is also meant to help diversify the company’s customers. ULA says it has a roughly 70-launch backlog for Vulcan, which includes 38 launches to put Amazon.com Inc.’s Project Kuiper internet satellites into orbit.
Read More: Amazon Says Prototype Internet Satellites Are Working as Planned
--With assistance from Bruce Einhorn.
(Updates to add details in third paragraph.)
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
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2024-01-08 09:57:27Z
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