United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket is set to return to flight Friday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station after being grounded since February.
An issue with one of the rocket's solid boosters prompted the grounding and investigation into an anomaly observed in the rocket’s solid rocket boosters.A search for what went wrong is still ongoing. ULA has implemented some fixes ahead of this launch.
A 29-minute launch window opens on Friday at 12:54 p.m.
Don Platt, the Spaceport Education Center’s Director at Florida Tech said a successful flight signals to the space community and there’s another launch provider online.
“I think that everybody wants to see alternatives and different possibilities, and have a healthy market,” Platt said. “Really imagine if you only had one restaurant that you could go to all the time, so we don't want to have just one launch provider.”
For this return to flight, Vulcan will carry a payload of 40 Amazon satellites into low-Earth orbit. It's the first launch of a planned 38 to help build Amazon’s space-based internet constellation.
Platt said when it comes to major payloads, ULA “was kind of the main provider, and so companies like SpaceX were trying to compete with them and trying to take away some of their market share. Of course, obviously, SpaceX has been very successful at that and has probably well over 90% of the entire market share out there right now. So, a company like ULA is kind of now behind the eight ball and trying to catch up.”
While Vulcan was able to deliver its payload into orbit back in February, Platt said the anomaly with the booster outweighed any success the mission had in the eyes of competitors and partners.
For this fifth flight, Platt said even if “Amazon gets their satellites in orbit, but they have some other anomaly, then that's a problem for them, and that's not moving forward toward getting the government customer base back. .”
If this upcoming mission has no problems and can deliver the satellites into low-Earth Orbit, he said it would also help companies and agencies have more options when planning future missions.
“It also drives costs down,” he said. “It drives innovation. You're not relying on just one type of vehicle to do every mission. You have alternatives, and sometimes maybe one vehicle is better suited for one mission, and a different vehicle is better suited for another different mission. If you have alternatives, you can kind of pick and choose the one that really works best for you for your particular mission.”
