Operational Vulcan Centaur Stacked at CCSFS

For the first time, the Vulcan Centaur set to be the first to launch has been stacked at SLC-41 on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.  The payload, the Astrobotics' Peregrine lunar lander is enclosed in the payload fairing and the system is fully assembled.  

Image credit: United Launch Alliance

ULA's new rocket has rolled between its vertical hangar and the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station several times for countdown rehearsals and fueling tests. But ULA only needed the Vulcan rocket's first stage and upper stage to complete those tests. The addition of the payload shroud Wednesday marked the first time ULA has fully stacked a Vulcan rocket, standing some 202 feet (61.6 meters) tall, still surrounded by scaffolding and work platforms inside its assembly building.

This moves the launch company closer to the first flight of Vulcan, the vehicle slated to replace ULA's Atlas V and Delta IV rockets. After some final checkouts and a holiday break, ground crews will transport the Vulcan rocket to its launch pad in preparation for liftoff at 2:18 am ET (07:18 UTC) on January 8.

Back on December 10th, word broke that the launch of what they're calling the Cert-1 mission for the Vulcan platform, which will carry the Peregrine lander, originally scheduled for early Christmas Eve morning was not going to make it when the attempt to complete a Wet Dress Rehearsal had problems.  Peregrine has only a few days per month when the proper trajectory to the moon is available.  The launch must be timed to allow the spacecraft to reach its landing site with the proper lighting conditions.  The January 8th early morning launch is the next available launch window to meet those requirements. 

ULA has had three launches in calendar 2023, and their fleet of launch vehicles is being used up.  They have one Delta IV Heavy left and 17 Atlas Vs.  As we've talked about for a while, ULA CEO Tory Bruno says that 70 Vulcan Centaur launches have been booked and they're targeting an average of two Vulcan launches per month by the end of 2025. That's a rather aggressive target, since that's pretty much exactly two years from this coming first flight.  Ars Technica's author, Stephen Clark, says that for comparison it took longer for both the Atlas V and Falcon 9 to reach four launches.  Part of that may be demand for the services, which has been growing steadily since the first years of both of those.  Still, 24 launches in two years is far more than either half of the ULA alliance, Lockheed Martin or Boeing, has ever launched in their histories.

A side light to this launch is the "race" to be the first private company to land on the moon between Astrobotics, Peregrine on this Vulcan vs. Intuitive Machines with their IM-1 Lunar Lander.  Tuesday it was announced that the IM-1 launch has slipped from January 12th to "no earlier than mid-February" from the KSC’s Launch Complex 39A, primarily because of the backlog there due to facilities at 39A that aren't available at SLC-40, SpaceX's other launch pad.  The Falcon Heavy USSF-52 launch, currently scheduled for Dec. 28, being delayed pushed the Axiom 3 out to Wednesday, Jan 17, and rippled through SpaceX's launch schedule. 

Landing on the moon is not assured for either probe, but the Peregrine sure seems to have "inside track" at this point.  With the successful landing of India's (the ISRO's) Chandrayaan-3 probe, the number of nations has gone up, but no smaller entity has succeeded at landing on the moon.  You might remember Japanese company ispace and their Hakuto-R lander attempting a landing last April, but not making it.  That said, NASA is still hoping to make private lunar landings a regular occurrence.  Both the Peregrine and IM-1 landers are funded under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS.