Closing Bell - Manifest Space: The Future of Vulcan, National Security & Space Under Trump 2.0 with United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno 12/12/24

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, blasted into 2025 with the launch of its long-awaited Vulcan Centaur rocket earlier this year. With a long history of launching national security missions, the company is now moving into commercial markets with the help of Vulcan and contracts with the likes of Amazon. ULA CEO Tory Bruno joins Morgan Brennan from the Reagan National Defense Forum to discuss the evolving launch market, what Trump 2.0 will mean for commercial space, and what the future of Boeing’s commercial space will mean for the company.

We have ignition and liftoff of the first United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket, launching a new era in spaceflight to the moon and beyond. United Launch Alliance blasted into 2024. Literally. The company, also known as ULA, launched its long-awaited powerful new Vulcan Centaur rocket on its maiden flight January 8th, the first of two successful demo missions conducted this year. Those are the two required flights. We turn in all of our data. The government has been with us for the last seven years, but then they do a final assessment of everything in what's called an IV&V,

an independent verification and validation, and then they'll certify us any time now. ULA has a long history of launching national security missions, and with Vulcan, is moving more into the commercial market as well, thanks to contracts with Amazon and others. But Tori Bruno, CEO of the Lockheed Martin Boeing joint venture, says geopolitical threats on Earth mean critical infrastructure in space needs more protection. Space is essentially an undefended domain. So we are going to have to contend with that.

Policy has been all around resiliency, which is to say having a space architecture that can take a few attacks and keep operating. That's essential because we don't think really any longer that a terrestrial conflict could extend into space. I think we now know that a terrestrial conflict starts in space first. So those assets will be attacked. What we need to add to the portfolio now is the ability to fight back and defend ourselves. It's one thing to be able to take a punch and keep fighting, but you have to be fighting and make them stop punching at some point.

On this episode, Bruno discusses the evolving launch market, what Trump 2.0 will mean for space, and what speculation over the future of Boeing's space business means for ULA. We even take a detour into the evolution of hypersonic missiles. I'm Morgan Brennan, and this is Manifest Space. Joining me now from the Reagan National Defense Forum is Tori Bruno, the CEO of United Launch Alliance. Tori, it's always great to speak with you. Thanks for being with me. It is my pleasure. So, we did this last year. A lot's happened in a year. Vulcan has flown twice. Yes, it has. So exciting. Beautiful flights, too.

Excellent mission. Yeah, and you have another one coming up now. It's been certified. You're going to be doing your first official national security line. We'll be certified shortly. Oh, okay. Those are the two required flights. We turn in all of our data.

The government has been with us for the last seven years, but then they do a final assessment of everything and what's called an IV&V, an independent verification and and validation and then they'll certify us anytime now. Do you already have another launch date on the books? We do but the customer hasn't announced it. There's space for so I have to wait for them. Okay your expectation then for next year with Vulcan and launch cadence? Oh so next year will be very very busy for us. If all the satellites show up on time,

we could launch as many as 20 times. I think it'll probably be a little bit less than that, as that volume of satellites are making its way through the factory. And then the following year, it'll be closer to 25. So it really starts to ramp up here in a meaningful way. How does that speak to the supply demands, which So it really starts to ramp up here in a meaningful way. How does that speak to the supply-demand, which we've talked about in the past, but

the supply-demand dynamics in the market as we do see all of these satellites, both for government customers and for commercial customers, needing to go to orbit? Yeah, it's a really dynamic time in the industry. The bottlenecks are in the supply chain, but I think very soon we'll start to see crowding at the ranges as well. We've actually been building rockets ahead and stockpiling them for this launch rate, which is something that never happens in the space launch industry, just to be able to get in front of all of that. There's been a lot of chatter this year about the fact that SpaceX is really dominating the launch industry. Do you expect that to continue or with Vulcan coming on in a more meaningful way, Blue Origin

perhaps finally starting to launch New Glenn next year, do you think the competitive landscape changes? Well, I do. I think you'll see it balance out a little bit more. But all in all, there will still be more demand for launch than there will be available launch services. And, you know, big picture, this is good for the country because at a time when we're heading into these big challenges with China and Russia, especially China, having a broader industrial base is a good thing. When you say especially China, because we're in a space race with China, because of the adversarial nature of that relationship? A great power competition? Why China specifically? All of the above, but specifically also from a space perspective, China is developing and fielding anti-satellite weapons, or you could think of them as satellite killers, into orbit right now. And for us, space is essentially an undefended domain.

So we are going to have to contend with that. Policy has been all around resiliency, which is to say having a space architecture that can take a few attacks and keep operating. That's essential because we don't think really any longer that a terrestrial conflict could extend into space. I think we any longer that a terrestrial conflict could extend into space. I think we now know that a terrestrial conflict starts in space first. So those assets will be attacked.

What we need to add to the portfolio now is the ability to fight back and defend ourselves. It's one thing to be able to take a punch and keep fighting, but you have to be fighting and make them stop punching at some point. And you've written about this even just recently. I think you published something on Medium getting into the details of this. What does fighting back look like? How quickly can those capabilities become reality? They can become a reality very quickly once we make up our mind to do it. You know, our company has been investing in that technology for a long time because I've seen this coming.

I believe others have as well. What it looks like is being able to block the access to our assets in space and literally being able to disable a satellite killer as it is approaching one of our spacecraft so that it cannot engage it and destroy it. The trick to all of this, though, is mobility. We have to be able to move at will throughout the space domain, and if we're forced to disable a hostile spacecraft,

we can create a debris field when we do it because of the unique nature of space. So when you say you've been making investments in anticipation of this, what do those look like at ULA? I think rockets when I think ULA. Think about our upper stage. We already have the highest energy, longest duration upper stage anywhere because of the unique nature of the missions that we fly Vulcan to. So we've been investing in putting even more performance and more flexibility and longer duration into that upper stage. They're very busy here

at the conference as we set up for all the activities over the weekend. So what is that, so I guess what does that mean for what you're expecting from this incoming Trump administration where space policy is concerned? Whether it is on the national security side or the civil side or commercial that seems to intertwine with all of the above? Well, I'm hoping that we move to the next step. Under the prior administration, there was a real focus on resiliency. That's an important first step. It's one half of the two-part strategy. I feel like we have that now, and we're in a very good position to move on to the next thing, which is to have this defensive capability so that we

can truly deter the adversary from attacking us because they know it won't work. One of the conversations I keep finding myself having is, especially if you are talking about deterrence where China is concerned, is how important space infrastructure is to establishing this next iteration of deterrence. What's missing? What needs to change? How to think about that in terms of preventing a future conflict? Yeah, a couple of ways. I'd start with the big picture that our conventional forces are the most powerful in the world, especially our Navy, which is extremely important when we're talking about China. The Pacific Ocean is vast, and the initial form of aggression will be on that side of the Pacific Ocean. So that's very, very important. Air power is important, too.

But what China understands, and we need to fully appreciate and get in front of, is that one of the things that makes our military so powerful on the ground is that it is enabled by space. If we don't have space, we can't communicate, our forces can't coordinate, we're essentially blind in whatever theater we're operating in. China knows that. It is an asymmetric weakness, and that's why they're investing in satellite killers. So when we look at space policy in 2025 and beyond, whether it is in this national security discussion,

whether it is on the civil side with Artemis with a lot of talk now on the campaign trail about going to Mars and finally seeing that happen what does that mean for the opportunities for ULA we are a player in all of that so it's it's just a really rich landscape and so much activity happening, and all of it is intertwined. So as we sort of develop these exploration opportunities and the civil environment and the civilian environment are utilizing space for business, for communication, for information sharing across the world, it's all the same technologies by and, that we use for national security. And so what that gives us is just greater depth, greater mass, and hopefully greater innovation and flexibility.

You always want a very competitive environment because when you have monopolies, it's harder to invest in technologies that will change your future. When we have a lot of companies, even when there's a lot of business, we're always looking for a way to do something new and different than somebody else. All of that will feed into our national security. So one of the other things I want to talk to you about, because I was with Vivek Ramaswamy earlier this week in Washington,

where he made some news because he was talking about the fact that from a defense standpoint, we need to be focusing more on drones and spending more on drones and hypersonics. You and I have had the hypersonic conversation before. You worked on hypersonics a while ago. And then the U.S. ceded that leadership to other parts of the world. Where are we in that race now? We're back in. So the United States is developing more than one hypersonics platform. We are playing catch-up because the adversaries, both China and Russia, have been investing in this ever since we put the technologies down.

Now, the good news for us is a lot of this is about sophisticated navigation and guidance, the ability to steer the hypersonic vehicle through that environment, and also about material science. We have a lead there in the basic technologies, so what we're doing now is applying them to the mission area. But the most important thing for us to think about as we develop that offensive capability also is how we defend against it when it's applied to us. And we have very good missile defenses, but honestly they are designed for ballistic threats. That's why you hear so much discussion around hypersonics. It's not the hypersonics part. Any ballistic missile that flies beyond what we consider short range is in fact hypersonic. It's the maneuvering part. So we have a rocket that launches a glider at rocket speed. We're going to intercept

it with another rocket of comparable velocity and it's simple as the fact that you have to lead the target. When you commit your interceptor, you're shooting at a point where you expect it to be when you get there. If it maneuvers off that path, then it defeats you. For short-range hypersonics, point defenses are fine because you'll catch them near the target, but for the long-range threat, which is what we're very worried about, you really have to defend against that from space with a directed energy platform because you can't outrun the speed of light. Do you expect we're going to see changes to the contracting and acquisitions process

for companies with the government, given the fact that these are the types of conversations we're having? Well, I hope so. We have actually a very good framework for procurement now. We just need to build velocity. And that means we need to shift sort of what we're procuring. So now that we've gotten through Vulcan development, for example, that was kind of a big bang kind of thing where we knew we had to develop the rocket to fly all the missions right out the gate and it needed to work the first time, which it did. But from this point forward, I have my team working on small increments.

I want to introduce a capability every six months. And the government needs to match that pace and be curing in that way, which means a lot more flexibility. So you're not necessarily sort of identifying the final end state you want, but what is the journey to that that will be beneficial every step along the way? And finally, I just want to ask a question, because United Launch Alliance is a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Boeing has been in the spotlight this year. There's been a lot of speculation, at least among investors and in the industry to a certain

extent, that perhaps Boeing is thinking differently about its defense and space portfolio, could even potentially exit parts of that portfolio. What would that mean for ULA? Does that change the dynamics in any way? Well, basically, no. Stand-alone company, we have our own employees, our own facilities, our own intellectual property. So in terms of either owner making decisions on their own space business, we're not directly affected. Beyond that, if we continue in this ownership structure, it would look just like this. If they choose to change it, that's up to them. But it's still an entity that essentially functions apart from the owners. I interact with them through a board of directors. They

meet four times a year. It's very traditional in that sense. I think a lot of times when people hear the phrase joint venture, they imagine it's two companies, in this case Boeing and Lockheed, designing and building things and cooperating for a customer. That's not what this is. This is a joint venture owned by two companies. Tori Bruno of United Launch Alliance, it's always great to speak with you. Thank you so much. Oh, my pleasure. Anytime. That does it for this episode

of Manifest Space. Make sure you never miss a launch by following us wherever you get your podcasts and by watching our coverage on Closing Bell Overtime. I'm Morgan Brennan.