ULA's New Rocket - Vulcan Centaur

[scaesare]

Exactly. James Carville desperately wants to find new owners for the company he runs.

The issue, at the risk of beating the horse, is that nobody with any sense is going to find value in ULA unless it’s at wholesale.



FWIW it is in reference to the significantly variable number of solids (and their impact on performance). Maybe it was a cutting edge concept when it was first implemented (Delta 2? Earlier than that?) but it’s a bit OBE these days. Solids are really OBE in general…

Yeah, the text under that heading on the slide says: "Solids: 0-6"

 

[scaesare]

Berger's Ars article about Vulcan not being able to find a payload to carry and maybe not flying until Fall has this interesting statement talking about being ready to launch earlier in summer if they had somethign to carry:

"The pacing item in our supply chain is the BE-4," United Launch Alliance chief executive Tory Bruno said about Vulcan during a conference call with reporters in March. The BE-4 rocket engines, two of which power Vulcan's first stage, are manufactured by Blue Origin. "The reason the BE-4 is a little bit behind everyone else is because it took a little bit longer to get it developed and finished. It is now. We have wonderful facilities at the BE-4 factory in Huntsville, which was just built and expanded, they literally doubled their factory size to do this. So they have to catch up now to everyone else in building ahead."

So it appears that the rest of the rocket would be ready to go, but getting the BE-4's is the limiting factor. So B.O. can't get them 2 more engines 6 months later? It sure seems like production is still an issue for B.O. It's not like there's a lot of demand for these things....

 

[JB47394]

So it appears that the rest of the rocket would be ready to go, but getting the BE-4's is the limiting factor. So B.O. can't get them 2 more engines 6 months later? It sure seems like production is still an issue for B.O. It's not like there's a lot of demand for these things....

Blue Origin has a use for seven BE-4s. If they're prioritizing their own engines over ULA's, then I could see the delay.

 

[scaesare]

They need to get cracking... heck Rocketdyne had to supply the Saturn program 10 F1's a year on average... you'd think 50 years later they could rev up the pace a bit...

 

[ecarfan]

Tory Bruno:

"The reason the BE-4 is a little bit behind everyone else is because it took a little bit longer to get it developed and finished.“

Nothing like a meaningless tautology to clear things up.

 

[scaesare]

Looks like BO finally delivered engine #2:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1780661200818200921