United Launch Alliance is shifting its launch plans to begin 2025. On Friday, the company began de-stacking its Vulcan booster at its Government Vertical Integration Facility (VIF-G) in order to make room for an Atlas 5 rocket.
Gary Wentz, vice president of Government and Commercial Programs at ULA, confirmed in an interview with Spaceflight Now that they de-stacked the Centaur upper stage and the interstage adapter last week.
“The big thing with the [USSF-106] destack is it’s really demonstrating the flexibility that we’ll have going forward to be able to pivot from Atlas to Vulcan back and forth in Lane-G, the traditional government lane,” Wentz said, referring to launch activities using VIF-G.
The shift comes as ULA continues to wait for the U.S. Space Force’s Assured Access to Space (AATS) to certify its Vulcan rocket to begin launching payloads as part of the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program.
ULA originally planned for its next launch to be the USSF-106 mission onboard a Vulcan rocket and it began stacking the vehicle in October 2024, following its second certification mission, dubbed Cert-2. Wentz said the government identified that payload as “their highest priority mission,” so they worked to get quickly ready for that.
“We stay integrated with the spacecraft teams and we were monitoring where (Amazon’s) Kuiper was and where the SF-106 partner was and so we made the decision that we had a little more time there,” Wentz said. “We knew we had some out-of-position work that we needed to do on the SF-106 booster. We had to replace some components and then subsequently we would retest those.
“And so, we elected to go ahead and LVOS (Launch Vehicle on Stand) that booster to get that work off the critical path so that we’re prepared to launch, whether it was 106 or Kuiper.”
ULA developed its Vulcan rocket with full transparency to AATS, which principally required two certification flights of the rocket before it could begin flying NSSL missions.
While the Cert-1 mission was performed without issue, an anomaly occurred less than a minute into the Cert-2 flight when a piece of one of the Northrop Grumman-built Graphite-Epoxy Motor (GEM) 63XL SRBs lost part of its nozzle. In a media roundtable in December, ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno said they were still working towards determining a root cause, but said that “there are insulators that failed that are bonded to the inside of the shell that becomes the nozzle.”
“We recovered parts of those and so that was pretty fortunate for us. Gave us really quick and early insight,” Bruno said. “We have a pretty good idea what happened and minor modifications that would be necessary and desired to correct that are already underway.”
During a media roundtable at the 2025 Space Mobility Conference in Orlando, Florida, on Jan. 28, Col. Jim Horne, Senior Materiel Leader of the Launch Execution Delta within AATS, clarified that it takes more than just completing the certification flights to earn full certification.
Horne said AATS is aiming for the end of February for the certification of Vulcan. He noted that reaching that milestone depends in part in how activities go connected to the investigation into the solid rocket booster (SRB) anomaly seen during the Cert-2 launch.
“There’s a whole set of engineering reviews we do across production, manufacturing, quality, sustainment, all aspects of what they do. And some of it is going through all of those data sets that they provided to us,” Horne said. “We’re still pouring through the Centaur qualification data. We’re still working through the SRB anomaly that we had on Cert-2. So some of it is driven by the launches themselves.”
“From our perspective, what we know today, we’ve given them all the information they need for certification,” Wentz said on Friday. “Being a former government employee, there’s a lot of details that they need to go through and get comfortable with before they release a certification. And so, they’re going through that process and we’re standing by.
“If there’s any additional information they request, we’ll be prepared to get it to them, but everything we’re hearing is that certification will be around the end of the month/first of March timeframe. And then once we get that, we’ll be cleared to move forward with the 106 config.”
Wentz said while they were not planning to have an anomaly with the SRB during the Cert-2 flight, it did provide an unforeseen opportunity to “see some variability in the system.”
“We would never test that, right? And so, we were able to push the system and had a successful flight,” Wentz said. “So now, as they take that flight data and integrate it back with their models, they can look at that variation and it gives them, my opinion, it’ll give them greater confidence going forward that you can have these kinds of risks and still have a successful flight.”
Horne told reporters that following certification, they would establish a timeline to get to the USSF-106 launch. It would be based on things like timing for fueling the spacecraft and closing out some “open lanes,” but he said launch would likely happen in the spring timeframe.
That lines up with what a spokesperson with AATS told Spaceflight Now in December: “The government anticipates completion of its evaluation and certification in the first quarter of calendar year 2025” and that it “anticipates the first NSSL mission in the second quarter 2025.”
Amazon’s Project Kuiper is up to bat
The change in launch manifest means that ULA’s first launch of the year will be a batch of Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband internet satellites on a mission dubbed ‘Kuiper-1.’ Wentz said ULA will process the Atlas 5 rocket to support that mission in parallel with the preparations for the USSF-106 mission.
During an interview with a few reporters in January 2024, Bruno said an Atlas 5 rocket is capable of launching 27 Kuiper satellites compared to 45 on Vulcan.
Amazon hasn’t specified how many satellites it plans to launch on the Kuiper-1 mission. In late January, the company announced on social media that “another batch” of its production satellites was “on its way to Cape Canaveral.”
🚨🛰 Project Kuiper update! Another batch of production satellites for our low Earth orbit internet constellation is on its way to Cape Canaveral, FL. These satellites, built to withstand the harsh conditions of space and the journey there, will be processed upon arrival to get… pic.twitter.com/moZUcmDWOK
— Amazon (@amazon) January 24, 2025
The goal of Amazon’s first constellation is to have a total of 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit. In addition to the remaining 46 launches it booked with ULA, Amazon also purchased 18 launches on Arianespace’s Ariane 6 rocket; 12 launches on Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, with options to add another 15 on top of that; and three launches on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.
“When you’re a commercial person, you’re thinking more about the front end of populating that initial constellation because although its true that a PLEO (proliferated low Earth orbit) or mega-constellation can lose a bunch of satellites, take a bunch of punches, if you will and keep on doing their job, they don’t start being useful until you get about 60 to 70 percent of that first shell on orbit,” Bruno said in January 2024.
“So you’re building a lot of satellites and you’re spending a lot of money and you’re signing up subscribers, but you’re not providing any service until you break that threshold. So the front end of this for a commercial application, like Kuiper, like OneWeb, anybody, Starlink, is you want to rapidly get them up there and hit that.”
Amazon has eight remaining launches using ULA’s Atlas 5 rockets in addition to the 38 Vulcan flights it purchased in 2022. It flew two prototype Kuiper satellites on an Atlas 5 launch in October 2023.
Wentz said on Friday that ULA has “quite a few Kuiper Atlases planned” to launch in 2025 in addition to some number of Kuiper launches using Vulcan rockets. He said the rocket requested by Amazon will depend on their need at the time.
“We’re driving the factory (in Decatur, Alabama), for instance, to have all the Atlases built out, including the remaining crewed by April,” Wentz said. “We’re starting to already phase out a lot of the production line activities for Atlas.”
He said the first Vulcan rocket that will launch Kuiper satellites is currently in production as well.
“We’re prepared to have both vehicles ready and then it’ll come down to Kuiper managing how many spacecraft they want to put up and on what vehicle,” Wentz said. “So, they have a lot of flexibility.”
In order to help increase the flow of launches, ULA has been making a number of modification on what it calls the Amazon Vertical Integration Facility (VIF-A), which was previously referred to as the Spaceflight Processing Operations Center (SPOC). The roof is being extended by 45 feet (13.7 m) and assembly work continues on the Amazon Vulcan Launch Platform (VLP-A).
Wentz said ULA is targeting early summer to have VIF-A capabilities come online.
