United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Rocket Scheduled for First Demonstration Flight on Christmas Eve

United Launch Alliance (ULA) has announced that it will make its final attempt to launch its new Vulcan rocket this year on December 24, with backup dates set for December 25 and 26. ULA is still waiting for delivery of an upper stage and is undergoing qualification testing following a test mishap earlier this year. Despite potential threats to the schedule, ULA officials are confident enough to publicly disclose the launch date and have instructed Astrobotic, which will be flying its first commercial Moon cargo lander on the Vulcan rocket, to ship its spacecraft from Pittsburgh to Florida in anticipation of a December launch. ULA’s CEO, Tory Bruno, explained, “We need to finish building our upper stage and ship it down there (to Cape Canaveral). There’s some qualification testing in parallel. Both of those get done in November. The booster is already there ready to go, and the reason it’s Christmas Eve is because of science, orbital mechanics.” The Vulcan rocket will replace ULA’s Atlas and Delta rockets and was chosen by the Pentagon to launch the majority of the military’s national security space missions through 2027.