United Launch Alliance is staging rockets at launch complexes on both the West Coast and East Coast for the first time after November 2022.
On Tuesday, the company announced the arrival of its transport ship, called the R/S Rocket Ship, to a port at Vandenberg Space Force Base. There it unloaded the booster and upper stages for the first Vulcan rocket to fly from California.
After loading flight hardware from ULA’s rocket manufacturing plant in Decatur, Alabama, in December, the ship headed for Port Canaveral, Florida. After that, it was off to California in early January.
In a statement to Spaceflight Now, the US Space Force’s Systems Delta 80 (SYD 80) said the first planned Vulcan mission from Space Launch Complex 3 (SLC-3) is the Space Development Agency’s T1TR-B (Tranche 1 Tracking Layer B) mission. A spokesperson said the thought was that “disclosure is constantly evolving,” so it could change.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, the company hoisted the payload for the USSF-87 mission on a separate Vulcan rocket inside its Vertical Integration Facility at Space Launch Complex 41 (SLC-41).
“Atop the rocket, as a forward spacecraft, the Northrop Grumman-built Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) spacecraft is launching into GEO with an ascending node injection to improve our ability to rapidly detect, warn, characterize, and characterize disturbances in space systems in the geosynchronous environment,” ULA wrote in a blog post Wednesday.
“previous [space vehicle]Provided by Northrop Grumman, there is a propelled ESPA (EELV Secondary Payload Adapter) that launches multiple payloads directly injected into GEO orbit.
A spokesperson for SYD 80 described the secondary payloads on the mission as “research, development, and training systems that the USSF is using to refine tactics, techniques, and procedures for precision orbital maneuvers.”
“They will also enhance and validate the flexibility and safety of geosynchronous orbit,” a SYD 80 spokesperson said.
ULA is targeting a launch of the USSF-87 mission no later than February 12. As is typical for missions with payloads related to national security, the launch time will not be announced until the flight takes off.
The company is working toward re-establishing its West Coast launch capabilities after its last Atlas 5 rocket is scheduled to fly atop SLC-3 on Nov. 10, 2022. It performed a technology demonstration for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) along with the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS)-2 satellite, as well as for NASA and ULA, called the Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of the Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID).
After that final flight, ULA began converting that pad from an Atlas 5 configuration to a pad dedicated to its Vulcan rocket. Tory Bruno, former president and CEO of ULA, previously said that Work Out West faced challenges due to supply chain constraints, but that they were worked around over time.
Part of the work required at Vandenberg was to dredge the harbor to allow rocketship barges to safely unload flight hardware. Also, unlike the SLC-41 launch in Florida, where the rocket rolls from the VIF to the pad, in SLC-3 ULA is using a Mobile Service Tower (MST) that will move away from the rocket before flight.
