Testing at Starbase Resumes - Plus Vulcan Update

There were postings about road closures this week that eventually narrowed down until today, with the County website saying road closure in effect from 12 noon to midnight tonight.  Around 2PM ET, I flipped a browser tab to Lab Padre to find the road had closed by 12:10 PM and the pad area was clear by 12:40 PM.  NASASpaceflight speculated that there would be a Spin Prime test of ship 25 but they were the only place I saw mention that.  Instead, it appeared to be a test of some of the new infrastructure in the launch area.  They simply fueled ship 25 and then let it depressurize itself, but it tested new "stage zero" hardware. 

This is pretty much the end of the test and the start of allowing the ship to depressurize.  Ship 25 has had some testing already, but since SpaceX has pretty much said Booster 9 and Ship 25 take the next orbital test flight, it makes sense to start getting ready with the hardware that's next.  There's no such thing as too soon to start testing what can be tested.  

I've been following the repair/redesign work at the Orbital Launch Mount as best as I can, and it's moving at an impressive speed.  That link in the previous paragraph includes a 20 second video from SpaceX of testing their water deluge system by firing a Raptor at it.  It's tough to see exactly what's going on, but it looks like the system handles one engine with no issues.  I know both the size of the deluge system and the number of engines increase dramatically when it's time to launch, but I guess we'll see that verified one step at a time.  

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United Launch Alliance is saying their test last week was successful and that the failure investigation of the Centaur upper stage is complete.   

In replies on Twitter Tuesday, Bruno provided the first public confirmation that the United Launch Alliance's investigation into the Centaur failure is complete. Although the report is not public, it appears that the hydrogen tank failed during a pressure test at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

"The super thin, high performance steel skin needs to be a little thicker near the top of the dome," Bruno said, adding, "Working corrective action and retest."

This seems to push the first Cert-1 flight of Vulcan Centaur back toward the end of the year at best and pushing it into '24 wouldn't be a surprise.  The new upper stage needs to be built, tested, certified, and built into flight hardware.  That's all non-trivial.  There need to be two Cert flights and we're absolutely not getting both in calendar '23. 

In 2020, Space Force awarded a contract to ULA and to SpaceX to launch national security payloads.  Just like how Boeing was awarded more pay per flight of Starliner than SpaceX was awarded for Crew Dragon flights to the ISS, ULA was awarded 60 percent of the launches, and SpaceX got 40 percent. In addition, ULA gets paid more per launch than SpaceX gets.  In rough numbers, SpaceX gets $90 million/launch while ULA gets $105 million/launch - $15 million more than SpaceX. 

Which makes it noteworthy that Space Systems Command said it recently assigned a dozen Phase 2 missions to the two launch companies at a 50-50 split rather than a 60-40 split.  They're starting to get concerned about Vulcan not being available yet.  

Additionally, just last week, a US Government Accountability Office report (pdf warning) mentioned that delays were causing military officials working on the Phase 2 launch program to consider their options. "In the event that Vulcan is unavailable for future missions, program officials stated that the Phase 2 contract allows for the ability to reassign missions to the other provider," the report states.