Last night had unexpected fun, thanks to NASA Spaceflight

It doesn't seem possible to know exactly how many people enjoyed this last night, but we were treated to quite the surprise when we tuned in to NASA  Spaceflight's YouTube channel to watch the United Launch Alliance Vulcan fly its first National Security Mission, USSF-106.  With a launch time of 8:58 PM EDT, I worked on a post while listening to and watching the video.  

The surprise was that last night was also the launch of a European Space Agency Ariane 6 from French Guiana, scheduled for roughly 15 minutes before the USSF-106 mission.  As the evening progressed, NSF said they'd stream the Ariane 6 launch as well.   Within minutes, they added a stream of some testing going on at Starbase in Boca Chica, preparing Starship 37 for its flight, currently scheduled for next Friday, August 22nd at 7:30 PM.  

This video is 2 hrs:13m:10s long but if you want, you can move the slider over to 60 minutes in. At that point, there's three minutes and 51 seconds until liftoff on the Ariane 6 clock (the bottom one in the upper left corner). The top clock says 22:01 until the Vulcan Centaur launch.

You can easily watch the Ariane launch and the coverage is managed by the NSF guys so that you can see everything that can be seen in both launches.  When the Ariane reaches its orbit, it's on the order of 8 minutes into the 18 minutes between the launch times. The Vulcan launch had several aspects I haven't seen before: the (Blue Origin) BE-4 engines had a very evident blue color, quite striking to see.  Far enough down range that the distance might be why I've never noticed it, but at night, it was very evident.  Vulcan also shook our patio doors and windows for what seemed like a long time - maybe a minute.  

Both launches were successful, and the industry news sites are cheering the progress of the Vulcan.   Ars Technica's Stephen Clark writes of the next big test for the Vulcan, summarizing the launch.  As we said before, unlike most National Security launches, there was actually some word about one thing that flew on USSF-106:  a test of some concepts for a successor to the current GPS navigation satellites. 

The USSF-106 mission will carry multiple payloads, but to date, the only one that has been publicly identified is the Department of the Air Force’s Navigation Technology Satellite-3 (NTS-3). The prime contractor is L3Harris Technologies, which integrated an agile positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) payload onto an ESPAStar satellite bus from Northrop Grumman.

Artist's illustration of the NTS-3 satellite with its solar panel deployed in orbit. Credit: L3Harris

While the press before the launch was that ULA was going to attempt their next NSSL mission, USSF-87, NextSpaceflight.com is showing that the next launch will be one of ULA's remaining Atlas V missions carrying a load of Kuiper satellites for Amazon.  The date for the USSF-87 mission isn't firm, simply "NET 3rd Quarter, 2025."

ULA has a lot to work on.  Their biggest issue is that there are currently 24 missions in their calendar marked NET 2025, that added to launches already carried out this year exceeds the stated goal of 25 per year but done in 4-1/2 months, well under half a year.  And that's not even talking about the Big, BIG challenge:

ULA is also moving forward with modifications to Vulcan's core stage to allow for the recovery and reuse of the rocket's main engines. Tory Bruno, the company's chief executive, announced last week that engineers completed a critical design review for the hardware changes required for engine reuse. These changes include severable mechanical and fluid connections for the engine section to jettison from the rocket, plus a heat shield and parachute to safely bring the engines back for an ocean recovery downrange from the launch pad.