![ULA CEO says inaugural Vulcan rocket launch planned for December](https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/107322483-3ED3-REQ-ULA-CEO-TORY-102423.jpg?v=1698172577&w=750&h=422&vtcrop=y)
United Launch Alliance plans to launch the inaugural flight of its Vulcan rocket on Christmas Eve, CEO Tory Bruno told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan on Tuesday.
Bruno, speaking on the CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit, said the goal window for Vulcan’s first launch runs between Dec. 24 and Dec. 26. The rocket will lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
ULA is currently working to construct and qualify the upper stage of the rocket, running those tasks “in parallel,” Bruno said, with each expected to “get done in November.”
Within the event ULA misses the December window resulting from shipping delays or bad weather, the corporate — a three way partnership of Boeing and Lockheed Martin — will move back the launch to January.
The Vulcan rocket for the Cert-1 mission stands at SLC-41 during testing in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on May 12, 2023.
United Launch Alliance
Vulcan’s first mission will carry a industrial lunar lander built by Astrobotic and a payload for Celestis. The latter will contain the ashes of people that desired to be buried in space as a part of a memorial service.
Previously, ULA intended the flight to incorporate two demonstration satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper, but ULA individually launched those prototypes on a unique rocket in early October.
ULA’s path to the primary Vulcan launch faced several delays earlier this 12 months, including the explosion of an engine during testing by its supplier Blue Origin, previously reported by CNBC. Following the incident, Bruno told CNBC in a “Manifest Space” podcast interview that the corporate still planned to fly its heavy-lift rocket by late 2023.
Once Vulcan launches, ULA plans to launch “several times” in 2024, Bruno said, before ramping to a rate of each other week by the second half of 2025. The corporate added an enormous contract to launch Amazon’s Kuiper satellites to its previously government-heavy backlog for Vulcan.
“It does change the character of our business. It makes it quite a bit more balanced. Before we were probably about 80% government. And now with our other industrial work in Amazon Kuiper constellation, it’s about 50-50,” Bruno said. “That is quite a bit healthier place to be, because when one is out, the opposite continues to be nice.”
— CNBC’s Morgan Brennan and Michael Sheetz contributed to this report.
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