Much depends on the first launch of the new Vulcan rocket from United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
A successful launch from Cape Canaveral next week would allow ULA to clear a large backlog of missions worth hundreds of millions of dollars and gain a better competitive position against Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
And it could prove crucial to the two US space companies’ plans to sell their joint venture.
“It’s a very nervous time for them,” said George Sowers, ULA’s former chief scientist who was instrumental in Vulcan’s founding. “It really is the future of their company.”
The first mission is a long-awaited milestone after months of delays in the final stages of Vulcan development and after a mishap in testing last year with a Vulcan upper stage launcher. ULA CEO Tory Bruno has said that Vulcan performed well in recent ground tests.
“This is an incredibly complicated machine, it is incredibly powerful. Everything has to work,” said Bruno on Saturday on the Vulcan launch pad. “It’s always a risk to fly a rocket. But we’re good at managing that risk.”
The mission’s checklist includes transporting a lunar module that will enable the United States’ first soft landing on the moon in half a century. The rocket will, for the first time, use engines supplied by Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin.
The Vulcan launch comes as Boeing and Lockheed, which formed ULA in 2006 through a merger of their rocket programs, are seeking to sell the joint venture, according to three people familiar with the discussions.
The talks were a complex, lengthy process for which the launch of Vulcan could have a crucial impact, said the sources, who did not want to be named.
ULA declined to comment on discussions about a possible deal. Bruno has already said his company could be ripe for a takeover.
Boeing and Lockheed declined to comment.
Vulcan’s first launch, scheduled for 2:18 a.m. ET (0718 GMT) Monday, is the culmination of years of development work, borne largely out of ULA’s need to replace its current Atlas V rocket. This rocket’s engines, imported from Russia, were criticized by lawmakers and led to its planned decommissioning.
With the retirement of the Atlas – and Vulcan’s other rocket, Delta – the 60m-tall Vulcan is left to carry out dozens of lucrative missions and serve as the sole challenger to SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9.
Vulcan’s first mission will send a privately built lander from space robotics company Astrobotic to the moon. The launch itself will also be the first of two certification flights required by the US Space Force before Vulcan is allowed to fly Pentagon satellites.
The Space Force is a key customer for the Vulcan – the military agency chose ULA’s Vulcan and the outgoing Atlas V in 2020 to launch 60% of the Pentagon’s missions through about 2027.
At a price of about $110 million per launch, Vulcan will try to steal market share from the Falcon 9, which is priced at about $62 million per launch. SpaceX’s cheaper flights have eroded ULA’s dominance of government satellite launches over the past decade.
Vulcan will also compete with Blue Origin’s upcoming New Glenn rocket, which uses the same engines as Vulcan.
TAKEOVER TALKS
The takeover talks for ULA have been going on for more than a year. Dozens of companies, including Blue Origin, have expressed interest, the sources said.
Blue Origin did not respond to a request for comment.
The reasons and timing for Boeing and Lockheed’s sale of ULA are unclear. However, the U.S. space industry has changed significantly since ULA was founded in 2006. Back then, the company was founded to dominate government launches and meet some commercial demand from the then-fledgling satellite market.
Growth in the commercial market has been slower than expected, said Richard McKinney, an aerospace consultant and former director of the Air Force’s space acquisition division until 2007. “But it looks like we’re almost there now.”
Amazon’s planned Kuiper network will provide ULA with important launch revenue. This has helped give Vulcan a backlog of about 70 missions worth billions of dollars, split roughly equally between government and commercial customers, Bruno said.
Vulcan’s development and ULA’s move away from Atlas and Delta rockets have made estimates of the company’s value difficult to determine, but analysts speculate it could be between $2 billion and $3 billion.
Boeing and Lockheed each have their own competing space divisions. Among other things, Lockheed has ventured into building lunar rovers and made strategic investments in ABL Space, a small-launch startup that aims to build larger rockets in the future.
Boeing’s space program has struggled, most notably with its long-delayed Starliner astronaut capsule, which competes with SpaceX’s more established Crew Dragon. The problems with Starliner development have cost Boeing around $1.5 billion since 2014.
The new ownership could allow ULA to innovate beyond the launch sector in ways the parent company didn’t want to allow, said former ULA chief scientist Sowers.
“The company’s charter was codified, and that was very restrictive,” he said. “They were constantly competing with each other and couldn’t agree on anything. We weren’t allowed to innovate. (Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Ben Klayman, Rosalba O’Brien and Leslie Adler)