The Vulcan Centaur rocket is heading to Cape Canaveral for its inaugural test flight. The spaceship left the United Launch Alliance (ULA) building facility in Decatur, Alabama, on a RocketShip. PUN intended because that's the name of the RO-RO ferry that carries the three sections of the Vulcan rocket toward the launch site.
The ship will sail over 2,000 miles (3,200 km) of rivers and seas around Florida to deliver its payload to the Space Force base. According to ULA, the Vulcan Centaur is as versatile as it comes. Its capabilities range from Low Earth Orbit to the Kuiper Belt, where Pluto – the cosmic object, not the Disney talking dog – resides.
After the Vulcan returns to solid ground, ULA will prepare it for launch. This includes a range of tests – the climax will be an engine flight readiness firing. After all preliminary stages are checked as passed, the certification flight can fire up.
Known as Certification-1 (or Cert-1), this inaugural mission will put two prototype broadband satellites into low Earth orbit (part of the Project Kuiper program to provide internet to remote regions). Also, the Astrobotic Peregrine commercial lunar lander will begin its journey to the Moon during the Cert-1 flight. Finally, the Vulcan will launch a Celestis Memorial Spaceflight Payload into deep space.
Photo: ulalaunch.com
Powered by a pair of Blue Origin BE-4 engines, the new rocket takes half the time to build (by comparison with previous ULA models). It can also ship cosmic cargo faster than the aging Delta or Atlas.
Amazon's own Project Kuiper has 38 launches booked for the Vulcan rocket and Sierra Corp's Dream Chaser space plane. The latter is a reusable hauling spaceship intended to replace the shuttle program that closed 12 years ago.
The Vulcan Centaur is a 221-foot-tall (67.4 meters) spacecraft in its extended configuration. The standard size is just 202 feet – 61.6 meters - and both setups can use up to six additional Solid Rocket Boosters (SRB). The thrust of the rocket's main engines is over half a million pounds - 550,000 lbf, to be specific, or 2.44 MegaNewtons.
Photo: ulalaunch.com
The main booster alone is 17.7 ft (5.4 m) in diameter and 109.2 ft (33.3 m) long – more than half the space vehicle's entire height. Depending on its mission, the Vulcan can take off with no SRBs or carry two, four, or six external Northrop Grumman engines. Combined, these can deliver a maximum extra boost of 459,600 lbf. (2,000 kN) over ninety seconds. Slightly smaller than the primary engine, the boosters measure 63 inches in diameter (1.6 m) and 71.8 ft (21.9 m) in height.
The rocket's upper, reusable stage – the Centaur - is 17.7 ft (5.4 m) in diameter and 38.5 ft (11.7 m) long and carries 120,000 lbs. (54 tons) of liquified hydrogen and oxygen for its twin RL10C engines. Manufactured by Aerojet Rocketdyne, these engines stack up to 48,000 lbf of combined thrust (213 kN).
The gallery shows a simplified exploded diagram of the layout of the Vulcan Centaur rocket. You can also see that the payload fairing – the rocket's tip (or "trunk") is available in two configurations: the standard 51 ft (15.5 m) or the 70 ft (21.3 m) extended version. The latter option is configurable as a single-volume cargo space or a "multi-manifest" storage capability to maximize usable volume and optimize launch costs.
After nearly two decades in news television, Răzvan turned to a different medium. He’s been a field journalist, a TV producer, and a seafarer but found that he feels right at home among petrolheads. Full profile
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