ULA Lays out plans for getting to their 25 launches/year cadence

The last time I checked, Monday the 4th in the evening, the scheduled launch time for United Launch Alliance's first National Security launch on NextSpaceflight.com was shown as this coming Sunday at 8:07 PM.  At the moment, if you click on that link, you'll see that it has slid out to Tuesday, Aug 12, 2025 7:59 PM EDT.  Yeah, here we are three days later and the launch has slipped two days, but this is a very significant launch for ULA because it's carrying not just one National Security payloads, but two.

“This is a pretty important event for the company and for the capability, but also for all of us personally. This is the inaugural launch of Vulcan into national security space. It is what we designed this rocket to do,” said ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno during an audio roundtable with reports on Aug. 7.

“This particular mission is interesting to us because while, if you were picking, you might choose to start with a more plain vanilla mission, this is, in fact, the anchor case that drove the design and the architecture of the whole rocket,” Bruno added. “This is the tough mission, directly injected to GSO, geosynchronous orbit. It makes it one of our longest duration missions ever.” 

This mission, named USSF-106, is the first of nine planned missions that ULA aims to achieve before the end of the year. These will be a mix of commercial and government customers with some of the former flying on Atlas 5 rockets.  Those nine launches in a bit over four months is unprecedented for ULA. 

“We have a stockpile of both Atlases and Vulcans fully built, ready to fly. So that is another thing that sort of kicks up that confidence higher than it would’ve been, say, if you’d asked me a question like that last year,” Bruno said in response to a reporter question about his confidence in flying nine more times in 2025. “There are 13 Atlases to go. All but the last two are fully finished and literally in storage, some at the Cape, some still back at Decatur, and those last two will be finished shortly.”

The remaining Atlas 5 rockets are allocated as follows (not in order of planned launch): 

7 – Amazon’s Project Kuiper (up to 27 satellites per rocket)

6 – Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft (for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program)

1 – Viasat’s ViaSat-3 F2 satellite (expected to arrive in Florida by end of September 2025)

The leading numbers: 7, 6, and 1, are the number of Atlas 5s committed to those launches.  In addition to those 14 Atlas 5s, “We’ve got almost half a dozen Vulcans fabricated in storage, waiting to go as well and lots and lots of SRMs, up into the 40s,” Bruno adds, “So that helps us with that.”

A trio of United Launch Alliance Vulcan boosters in storage at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Image: Tory Bruno/ULA

This week's USSF-106 is the first of a slate of 26 missions awarded to ULA as part of the NSSL Phase 2 contract worth $4.5 billion.

Bruno previously said that its 2025 manifest, following a pair of Atlas 5 launches for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband internet constellation, would see the flights of USSF-106 and then USSF-87. On Thursday though, he suggested that there may be some other flights in-between.

“[USSF-87] is the very next Space Force mission and, depending on when it happens, there may or may not be Atlases in between, flying for commercial customers,” Bruno said. Those would either be Amazon or Viasat, since NASA leaders previously said the next launch of Starliner won’t come until at least early 2026.

ULA is working on additions to their facilities at both Cape Canaveral SFS and Vandenberg SFB.  It seems inevitable that they'd complain about SpaceX cramping their attempts to increase their launch cadence, and that's made worse by SpaceX's efforts to add Starship facilities to their Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center properties.  SpaceX is hoping to get approvals to conduct up to 88 landings of the first and second stages of Starship, in addition to the static fire tests of both that would be needed ahead of integration and flight.  A problem that rarely gets mentioned is the need for each company to stop working to accommodate the other's launches and tests. 

The orange area is SpaceX's area that could be affected by Starship activity.  SLC-41 is where ULA launches Vulcans, which could affect work on LC-39A.  SLC-40 is currently Falcon 9 only but probably will add Falcon Heavy launches.  The stay clear areas work both ways: SpaceX won't be able to work at SLC-40 if ULA is launching from SLC-41.

Every time Starship lights its engines, it will require a massive clearance across the Florida spaceport, which as presented, would include LC-39B and SLC-41. Separately, the Department of the Air Force is considering SpaceX’s proposal to conduct up to 76 launches and 152 landings at SLC-37, which would feature two launch towers, if approved. [Note: SLC-37 is just below SLC-40 in this graphic and not visible in it.  - SiG]

“Starship is an interesting vehicle, in that it’s not just another rocket on the range. It is of an unprecedented size and the request that has been put in for the license is at a very, very high launch rate,” Bruno said. “We’re counting on the Space Force and the FAA to do a very thorough analysis of that and how it will affect not just the ecological environment, but also the launch environment.”
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“There are certain operations you can’t do on your pad when another vehicle is fueled, due to the energetics that are associated with that and that’s part of what the range has to do in directing traffic with the multiple users that are there now,” Bruno said. “This new user will be, as I said, unprecedented. It’s much larger than a Saturn 5. It is something that’s not been on the range before, so they need to do a very thorough and careful analysis of that.

Everyone is counting on Space Force to do a thorough and careful analysis.  Not too restrictive, not too lax.