Is ULA’s new rocket doomed?

With great fanfare United Launch Alliance (ULA) announced their new Vulcan Rocket last month. However since then the news has not been quite so rosy for the company.

Almost immediately after the announcement Paul Allen’s Vulcan Aerospace informed ULA that the name was trademarked, at present we have not heard anything further on this but it could result in a name change.

Last week ULA themselves stated that if the RD-180 engine ban wasn’t altered to allow them to purchase additional engines then the Next-Gen rocket may be impacted.  While this seems a little extreme the logic makes sense, if they cannot generate revenue from additional launches then funding a new rocket is going to impact the bottom line more severely.  At present ULA board has not fully committed to investing in the new rocket, and while they have approved the milestones for this year they are only committing funds on a quarterly basis.

Add to that the recent SpaceX certification to fly national security space missions thereby removing the monopoly ULA had on the segment.  Not only do ULA risk losing launches to SpaceX but even if they win it seems likely that they will have to lower their costs to compete thereby generating lower profits.

While ULA does have the Delta rocket family they could fall back on, they have made it very clear that it costs too much to produce and they are only keeping the Delta Heavy option for as long as customers are willing to pay for it.

So in summary it is very unlikely that the Vulcan rocket will be cancelled however the fact that it may take until 2022 before it can fly national security space missions and given the potential shortage of RD-180 engines ULA could be facing some hard times over the coming years as they attempt to fund the new rocket and also deal with the changing market that they once dominated.

It should also be noted that because the Air Force requires at least two launch options for it’s hardware it is very likely that something will be done to ensure ULA or another vendor other than SpaceX is available for future launches.

The information regarding the potential impact of the RD-180 engines was taken from the linked SpaceNews article.


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