Main Engine Cut Off

The 2020/2021 New Launch Vehicle sales cycle continues—New Glenn, Ariane 6, and now H3 all have commercial customers. Still waiting on those first Vulcan and Omega contracts.

I said this at the time, but I expected this news alongside either the BE-4 or Air Force selection announcements. Burying bad news with good news is always a solid plan, and I can’t imagine something has changed drastically in the last few weeks on the Vulcan front.

ULA says its on track for a mid-2020 flight of the BE-4-powered Vulcan. I was expecting to hear a bit of a delay with this announcement, because past statements sounded a lot like, “This is what we said previously so we’re going to say the same thing again until we update the schedule when we make the selection.”

I can only assume this use of common refers to the future use of Vulcan to launch Starliner. If that’s the case, it’s a good sign about where they’re at with the design of Vulcan, that they’re ready to make hardware changes to accommodate Vulcan in the future.

This Vulcan double-submission theory is something I’ve speculated about on the podcast and elsewhere in the past few months. The fact that we aren’t hearing the engine selection until the award announcement has me nearly completely convinced that’s the case.

I don’t remember RL10 being part of the previously-awarded EELV propulsion contracts. Wonder if that’s related to the recent announcements that both Vulcan and OmegA will use the RL10 as their upper stage.

This will only get really interesting when someone books a launch to use such a path, and any thoughts of consolidating all US launch infrastructure to a single location are nonsensical, but the possibility does enable some fun discussions for those working on Falcon Heavy and New Glenn, specifically.

I’d love to see the numbers involved here, but the fact that Bruno is putting this out there at all says a lot.