Many MindedVulcan eyes November 13 comeback after nine-month nozzle grounding
United Launch Alliance said on Oct. 28 that it plans to return Vulcan to flight on November 13, pending range approval. The rocket will lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. It will carry 40 Amazon Leo broadband satellites. This is the first of 38 Vulcan flights Amazon has booked to deploy most of its constellation.
The grounding followed a solid rocket booster nozzle anomaly in February 2026. Nozzle problems have now hit two of Vulcan's first four missions, and the rocket completed its mission both times. Investigators blamed the 2024 problem on a manufacturing defect in an insulator. ULA and booster maker Northrop Grumman have not publicly named a root cause for the February event. ULA says it found several potential contributors and mitigated them with design and process changes, and the flight will use the improved nozzle.
The flight is also the first Vulcan with all six solid boosters, an extended fairing that brings the stack to 221 feet (67.4 m), and a shortened Centaur upper stage optimized for low-Earth orbit.
For access to space, the point is capacity. The Pentagon has assigned Vulcan roughly half of its major launches through the early 2030s. During the grounding, the Space Force moved six missions to SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, while ULA received six originally assigned to SpaceX. So far the swaps have not changed the number of missions each company was awarded. A working second heavy-lift option widens the supply of rides for national security and commercial payloads. Nothing in our material shows it makes launches cheaper.
Watch the flight data. Brig. Gen. Eric Zarybnisky of Space Systems Command said at least two Amazon Leo missions will fly before Vulcan's next national security mission, perhaps early next year. ULA says testing and analysis will continue in parallel. Neither ULA nor Northrop responded to Ars's questions.
Source: Ars Technica