ULA said it is more than 98% complete with the Vulcan rocket’s qualification program, with the unfinished work associated with final ground testing of the Vulcan rocket’s Centaur upper stage. Engineers will spend the next several weeks analyzing data from the test-firing to make sure everything worked as designed.īut a launch schedule for the first Vulcan Centaur flight remains unclear. ULA says it installed additional instrumentation on the rocket to monitor the performance of the engines during the Flight Readiness Firing. A cloud of exhaust rises above the Vulcan Centaur rocket on pad 41 after the Flight Readiness Firing Wednesday night. That prompted a return of the rocket to the hangar for troubleshooting before ULA rolled the Vulcan launcher back to pad 41 Tuesday.
With those changes complete, ground teams planned to perform the Flight Readiness Firing on May 25, but ULA postponed the test-firing after discovering a problem with the BE-4 engine ignition system. The changes included adjusting a setting with ground hydraulic pressure, changing the topping rate for liquid oxygen, and changing the flow of purge and chill gas to the BE-4 engine igniters, according to Tory Bruno, ULA’s chief executive officer. ULA moved the Vulcan Centaur rocket back to the Vertical Integration Facility after the May 12 tanking test to make “adjustments” to the vehicle. Most recently, ULA’s launch team loaded methane, liquid hydrogen, and liquid oxygen propellants into the Vulcan booster and its Centaur upper stage during a May 12 tanking test.
ROCKET LAUNCH CAPE CANAVERAL TODAY SERIES
The Flight Readiness Firing was the culmination of a series of tests and countdown rehearsals at Cape Canaveral to prepare for the first Vulcan test flight. ULA technicians rolled the Vulcan Centaur rocket from its vertical hangar to pad 41 Tuesday at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in preparation for the test-firing. “Congrats to you, Tory, and the whole team!” Two methane-fueled BE-4 engines fire on the Vulcan rocket’s launch pad at Cape Canaveral Wednesday evening. “Nothing sweeter in rocketry than the word nominal,” Bezos tweeted Wednesday night. Blue Origin plans to use a cluster of seven BE-4 engines on its own New Glenn rocket, still in an earlier stage of development. The Vulcan rocket’s two BE-4 engines were built by Blue Origin, founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos. “Nominal run!” tweeted Tory Bruno, ULA’s chief executive. The test-firing sent a plume of exhaust out of the east-facing flame trench at pad 41. The engines throttled up to about 60% power for two seconds, then the rocket’s flight computer commanded the BE-4s to throttle down before shutting off the engines.
The startup sequence for the twin engines began at T-minus 5 seconds. ULA’s launch team loaded methane, liquid hydrogen, and liquid oxygen propellants into the Vulcan first stage and its Centaur upper stage Wednesday afternoon, then the countdown clock paused for several hours to allow engineers to evaluate whether lightning strike near the launch pad affected any critical systems.įollowing a final readiness poll of the launch team, the countdown resumed from a built-in hold at T-minus 7 minutes and the Vulcan Centaur rocket switched to internal power and the propellant tanks ramped up to flight pressure before valves opened to allow methane and liquid oxygen to flow into the BE-4 engine thrust chambers. Peller called the Flight Readiness Firing “our last major milestone on the path to launch” of the first Vulcan Centaur rocket. “This is as close as you can come to launching a rocket without actually launching the rocket, so a complete integrated test of all the airborne elements, the ground systems, all coming together, putting it through everything that we would on a normal day of launch, up to and including actually starting the main engine, everything short of releasing the rocket.”
“This is a huge milestone,” said Mark Peller, ULA’s vice president for the Vulcan rocket program.
EDT Wednesday (0105 UTC Thursday) and burned for about six seconds, generating nearly a million pounds of thrust as hold-down restraints kept the launcher firmly in the starting blocks at pad 41. The Vulcan rocket’s two BE-4 engines ignited at 9:05 p.m. United Launch Alliance’s first Vulcan Centaur rocket completed a critical test-firing of its Blue Origin-built BE-4 main engines Wednesday night, clearing one of two remaining technical hurdles before the launcher is cleared for its inaugural flight later this year.
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