Third Vulcan launch repeats the second

Not the good parts of the second launch but the bad part, with what looked like a repeat of one of the solid rocket boosters blowing it's nozzle out.  

The launch was at 4:22 AM EST (0922 UTC), and since it was a MOTN launch (Middle Of The Night), I had resigned myself to not getting up and going outside to watch it.  Well MOTN and launches that don't result in Return To Launch Site and booster landing are pretty much a one minute event which doesn't seem worth getting up for. Totally unplanned was that I was awake when the sound of the launch started rattling the house. The sound typically takes a couple of minutes before it reaches us - exact delay depending on the trajectory - so the big deal was over with by the time I heard it. 

Less than 30 seconds into the flight, there appeared to be a shower of glowing points, probably the result of burn through of one of the nozzles on a Northrop Grumman-built graphite epoxy motor (GEM) 63XL solid rocket boosters (SRBs). 

This morning's ULA Vulcan rocket climbs towards orbit in a shower of sparks from its solid rocket boosters. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now.

The tracking cameras allowed the ground control crew to get a close up look at the booster and they saw something that wasn't supposed to be there. On the right side of this image, exhaust is coming out of the SRB at a wrong angle. Instead of going straight down out of the nozzle, you can see a bright streak going more horizontally than it should, perhaps 20 to 30 degrees below horizontal. That appears to be originating in the nozzle of the booster on the right.

An anomalous plume is visible from one of the Vulcan’s solid rocket motors during the launch of the USSF-87 mission on Feb. 12, 2026. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now.

When an engine is pushing in a direction other than intended, the rockets going to move in a direction that wasn't planned.

Shortly after, as the rocket performed its pitch over maneuver, the vehicle began to roll in a more pronounced way than is typical for this stage of flight. The Vulcan rocket appeared to counteract the anomaly and the SRBs jettisoned as planned at T+ 1 minute, 37 seconds into the flight.

“We had an observation early during flight on one of the four solid rocket motors, the team is currently reviewing the data,” ULA said in a statement roughly an hour after liftoff. “The booster, upper stage, and spacecraft continued to perform on a nominal trajectory.”

We started this report by saying the launch repeats the second Vulcan launch, which was in October of '24. 

The 2024 booster malfunction occurred on the Vulcan rocket’s second test flight. The rocket did not return to action for 10 months as engineers probed the nozzle failure. Investigators determined that a carbon composite insulator, or heat shield, inside the nozzle failed to protect the nozzle’s metallic structure from the superheated exhaust coming from the booster. Engineers traced the cause of the failure to a “manufacturing defect” in one of the insulators, which led to the melting and burn-through of the booster nozzle. Officials said the damaged motor continued firing on the 2024 launch, albeit with less thrust and lower efficiency, and the Vulcan’s BE-4 main engines, supplied by Blue Origin, compensated for the thrust differential. The BE-4s on Thursday’s flight appeared to save the rocket once again. 

The second to last sentence in that quote contains the money quote. "The damaged motor continued firing with less thrust and lower efficiency, and the Vulcan's BE-4 main engines supplied by Blue Origin compensated for the thrust differential." That implies the Vulcan has a control system that compares its expected position and engine characteristics to the actual values and increases thrust, burn time, and very probably other parameters to put the booster in the desired place.  This is how it should be. 

Since the mission was to put classified satellites into classified orbits, all we know about it is the payloads are headed toward geosynchronous orbits. It's possible there might be more information coming on whether this mission was as successful as it seems - this morning Spaceflight Now said they expected to find out more in the afternoon, and that didn't seem to happen.  

Despite the booster problem, the Vulcan rocket deployed multiple military satellites into an on-target geosynchronous orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator. This mission, codenamed USSF-87, launched the Space Force’s seventh and eighth GSSAP surveillance satellites, also manufactured by Northrop Grumman. The satellites will maneuver around geosynchronous orbit to monitor other spacecraft, such as the clandestine fleets operated by China and Russia.