Since 2019 the United Launch Alliance has averaged six to seven launches per year, Air Force's Calvelli said, and that needs to increase to about two a month. — Bloomberg
AUSTIN: The Lockheed Martin Corp-Boeing Co joint venture that competes with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to launch the United States’ most sensitive satellites needs to pick up its pace as the Air Force is trying to certify its newest rocket as mission-ready, according to the service’s top acquisition official.
“Launch is foundational to our ability to deliver critical capabilities to orbit, and we need the commercial launch industry ready to meet the growing demand” for national security satellites, Frank Calvelli, the Air Force’s assistant secretary for space acquisition, said in a prepared statement Wednesday to a House Armed Services panel.
Since 2019 the United Launch Alliance (ULA) has averaged six to seven launches per year, Calvelli said, and that needs to increase to about two a month.
Last year, the company owned by Lockheed and Boeing performed only three launches, in contrast to competitor SpaceX, which launched a combined 96 government and commercial flights of its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.
That reflects the change in fortunes since Musk fought in the courts and Congress for the right, eventually granted by the Defence Department, to compete with what the entrepreneur derided as the Lockheed-Boeing monopoly.
ULA’s ability to ramp up will depend on a successful second flight of its new Vulcan rocket powered by a new BE-4 engine, Calvelli said.
The engine was developed by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin LLC to replace the widely used Russian-made RD-180 after Russia invaded Crimea in 2014.
Blue Origin also “‘needs to scale its production of BE-4s”, Calvelli said. “We are keeping an eye on whether these two companies can scale to meet our needs.”
After years of delay, the first Vulcan flight occurred in January.
Under the Space Force’s tight certification rules a second successful flight is needed to approve the rocket for the next round of the nation’s most sensitive missions.
SpaceX already has that certification, but SpaceX and ULA are still competing for the next round of national security launch contracts.
“Failure to complete the second certification flight will delay the launch” of three critical national security payloads this year already awarded to the Lockheed-Boeing alliance, including one for a new GPS satellite, Calvelli said.
United Launch Alliance said in a statement that it will be ready to launch by mid-year but that its customer for the payload on that commercial flight, Sierra Space Corp, has requested a later date so it expects to fly the mission before Oct 1. — Bloomberg
