Nearly a decade after United Launch Alliance (ULA), the rocket-launching joint venture between Boeing (BA +1.24%) and Lockheed Martin (LMT 4.62%), announced it would build a new Vulcan Centaur rocket with American engines to replace its existing fleet of Russian-powered Atlas V rockets, the new rocket roared off the launchpad successfully early Monday morning.
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Key Data Points
Vulcan departed Cape Canaveral carrying Astrobotic Technology's Peregrine lunar lander on a mission to deposit multiple payloads on the Moon. Unfortunately for Astrobotic, the Peregrine had to abandon its mission. But as for the Vulcan, that rocket flew just fine.
A big book of business
Monday's mission was the first of two launches that ULA will perform to win U.S. Space Force certification to use the rocket on national security missions. ULA plans to launch a second Vulcan in April, sending a Dream Chaser space plane to the International Space Station for Sierra Space.
With that accomplished, ULA will launch four more times before the year is through, making for a total of six spaceflights this year. That's twice as many launches as ULA was able to accomplish in 2023.
And the Vulcan will just be getting started. While ULA still has Atlas V rockets in its inventory, and will launch that model 17 more times before retiring it, the Vulcan is clearly the future for ULA.
CEO Tory Bruno said a total of 70 Vulcan launches are already on order, including no fewer than 38 launches carrying Kuiper satellites for Amazon's planned satellite internet service. To accommodate the workload, ULA has plans to ramp up Vulcan manufacturing to 25 units per year by the end of 2025.
To help meet this goal, the company plans to make the Vulcan partly reusable, detaching the rocket's main engine after launch and parachuting it back to earth, where it will be retrieved by helicopter and reused. If ULA can do this, it should also be able to cut the cost of its launches, with engines making up 65% of the cost of building a rocket.
How much does the Vulcan cost?
Last month, I wrote about how recent Pentagon contract awards proved ULA's success in fulfilling Bruno's vow to reduce launch costs. A recent packet of 11 Space Force launches was awarded at an average cost of only $118 million per launch. As Reuters reported this week, the company plans to charge even less for some future launches -- as little as $110 million.
Of particular note, that same Space Force award saw SpaceX charging $120 million per launch, although some of these will use more-powerful Falcon Heavy rockets. That caveat aside, it actually looks like ULA has fulfilled its promise to build a rocket capable of matching SpaceX's pricing, or at least come really close.
Catching up and falling behind
But will ULA be able to keep competing on price with SpaceX? Perhaps. Without boosters, ULA's base-model Vulcan can carry 10.8 metric tons of cargo to low earth orbit (LEO). SpaceX's booster-less Falcon 9 rocket, though, can carry more than twice that cargo to LEO for a lower price.
A boosted version of the Vulcan is expected to eventually be able to put 27.2 metric tons of cargo into orbit. But even there, SpaceX's ability to deliver 63.5 tons to LEO with the Falcon Heavy puts it well ahead of the Vulcan's capabilities.
It remains to be seen whether ULA will be able to charge a low-enough price on its "heavy" Vulcan launches to meet or beat SpaceX pricing, given SpaceX's greater lift capacity.
That's the bad news. The worse news for ULA is that, while it has finally managed to develop a rocket (after 10 years) that can compete with SpaceX's 14-year-old Falcon 9, SpaceX hasn't been lazing around the past decade and a half, waiting for ULA to catch up.
Rather, SpaceX is hard at work getting its Starship design finalized and tested. And once that behemoth begins launching payloads 100 tons at a time, it will charge as low as $10 million per launch.
Let's just say that ULA still has its work cut out for it if it hopes to catch up with SpaceX and stay caught up.
