Closing Bell - Manifest Space: ULA’s Next Vulcan Launch, Amazon Kuiper & National Space Security with United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno 7/24/25

Episode Date: July 24, 2025

ULA is preparing for its next Vulcan launch in what will be the first official national security mission for the new rocket. A joint venture between Boeing & Lockheed Martin, ULA will conduct several launches for the government and then turn back to its commercial customer Amazon in the fall. ULA CEO joins Morgan Brennan to discuss the latest launch forecast for the company, Amazon Kuiper, and the need for national security in space.

United Launch Alliance is preparing for its next Vulcan launch, what will be the first official national security mission for the new rocket. A joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, ULA will conduct several launches for the government and then turn back to its big commercial customer, Amazon, in the fall. CEO Tory Bruno says the recent public spat between the president and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk highlights the need for competition. All of that just really highlights how important it is for the country to have a broad industrial base and of course to have competition that's always good but multiple providers there can be

anything you know that can cause you to want to have either more surge capacity or just alternatives when things are going on. This just puts a highlight on that, especially with the pressure put on the infrastructure by the commercial Leo marketplace that's developed. They're there now with Starlink. We are also now there with Kuiper and Amazon and those are only going to grow. And then on top of that, we have future demands for Golden Dome, for example. On this episode, ULA's Tory Bruno

shares the latest launch forecast for the company, previews Amazon's Kuiper satellite service, and weighs in on the big and growing need to better secure space. I'm Morgan Brennan, and this is Manifest Space. Let's start with the latest at ULA. What do you have afoot, especially as everybody's awaiting your first official national security launches

with Vulcan? Well, it's really exciting this year. We've got Vulcan certified. We're about to fly our first national security space missions. We've started flying for Amazon Kuiper on Atlas. And so we're sort of champing the bid here to get going. Do you have a next launch planned?

Is there a date? We do. So we'll fly very soon. The customer hasn't announced the date yet, so I can't say, but really, really soon, we'll fly a Space Force mission. We'll follow that with two more, and then we'll pivot back to Amazon

and fly Vulcan for them in the fall. So how many launches should we expect this year? Because I think we had gone into the year anticipating something like 20. Is that still the right forecast? No, it's gonna be about half of that now as we have come into the sort of the middle of the year to really get Vulcan flying for service. Okay and I think there had been an anomaly with

your second flight of Vulcan. I would assume that's all hammered out and fixed? It is, yes. We had lost a nozzle off one of the solid rocket motors so that's understood and it's fixed And the corrective actions will be present on this upcoming flight. Great. In terms of the launch manifest, we've talked about it before, the fact that demand has been exceeding capacity.

Is that still the dynamic? Oh yes, absolutely. And even not only for us, but even on the range on Cape Canaveral, we're now seeing the Cape to be a very, very busy place. And sometimes you have to wait your place in line before you can go. Is there an opportunity or is it even being discussed, I guess, to either expand capacity there or to other parts of the country, given the fact that we're just seeing such a strong

trajectory for launches? Yeah, it absolutely is. You know part of part of the challenge there is geography matters You have you want to be a certain You know north-south location for the inclinations you're flying to you'd like to be able to fly directly over water And so you can't just go anywhere for the inclinations you're flying to, you'd like to be able to fly directly over water. And so you can't just go anywhere. You know, a spaceport in the center of the country is more for something like a dream chaser

that lands like an airplane rather than a heavy launch vehicle that takes off. So it's complicated, but it is also not just a commercial spaceport or a military spaceport when we talk about Canaveral. It is also an operational Department of Defense test site for other platforms. So all of that has to get into the mix. Some of those have more flexibility.

You just mentioned Dream Chaser. Is the plan still that's being built by Sierra Space, is the plan still to see the inaugural launch via ULA this year? Yes, we've got a rocket built for them and as soon as they're ready we'll go. It'll either be later in the year or next year, early next year, and we're pretty excited about that. That is such a cool vehicle with all of its flexibility. So how would you assess the space landscape right now? And we did see this falling out, very public falling out between President Trump and Elon Musk a couple of weeks ago.

And one of the things it shone a light on was SpaceX's dominance in certain aspects of this new space economy. But I know you're working on You know competition when it comes to rockets and launch as well Yes, well all of that just really highlights how important it is for the country to have a broad industrial base And of course to have competition that's always good, but multiple providers there can be anything You know that can cause you to want to have either

more surge capacity or just alternatives when things are going on. This just puts a highlight on that, especially with the pressure put on the infrastructure by the commercial Leo marketplace that's developed. They're there now with Starlink. We are also now there with Kuiper and Amazon and those are only going to grow. And then on top of that we have future demands for Golden Dome for example. Will you participate in the Golden Dome opportunity? How do you see that taking shape? Yeah we will relative to being a space lift provider for the assets that go to space. You know, the main bulk of Golden Dome is going to be about ballistic missile defense,

interceptors, early warning systems. Then there'll be another more space-based layer that will take a little bit longer to deal with the maneuvering hypersonic threat. We won't play a direct role in terms of interceptors and kill vehicles and things like that. That's not what we make. But as things go to space, we'll compete for them with the others and I expect we'll participate in doing that job. But you and I have had these conversations about national security space and securing space. You do have a history in hypersonic technology as well that you and I have talked about too multiple times.

I do and you've written manifestos about it. So I do wonder what you see as the opportunity to secure space, secure space infrastructure and the role that ULA could play in that. Yeah, that's a great question. And I've felt for a long time that we've only had half a strategy in securing space. We've been really focused on resiliency, which is to say, making the space assets able to absorb an attack with sort of the ability to kind of fight through that. that and that's what's driven us to these distributed networks and proliferated constellations. But it's only half the strategy. The other half is to defend yourself and make them stop shooting. You can't make more targets than the bad guys have bullets and eventually they would degrade your capability. What's new in the environment under this administration is that mission, that counter force mission we call it, is now okay. And there's a lot of scrambling going on right now to figure

out exactly how to do it, what are the options for it, and it will involve new spacecraft in orbit that can either defend themselves or defend the other critical assets from attack. That'll be important obviously to us and the other space assets from attack. That'll be important, obviously, to us and the other space launch providers, because somebody's got to put those in orbit, and it'll depend on where they're going. Do you think we're moving fast enough, especially when you just look at geopolitical tensions

here on Earth, that we're moving fast enough with this domain? We need to move as fast as we possibly can. So the general answer is no. We can go faster. We're going to go faster. We are behind right now. Our space technology is still a generation or two above China's in terms of the foundational tech.

But applying that to this mission, to anti-satellite weapons and the defense against them, that we have not really done. And they're in front of us and we've got to catch up. So there is no, there is no speed that we couldn't want to go faster than. It's interesting because the Pentagon is thinking differently about how it's contracting. Even just today, a big news announcement with the US is only Rare Earths minor and refiner into these Rare Earth magnets, MP materials, its public private partnership.

You've got the Pentagon actually taking an equity stake in the company, among other things. How do you see this landscape, this contracting landscape evolving from here? And how quickly can it enable some of these faster capabilities? Yeah, I think it needs to shift from where it was to something that also cares a lot about speed. And where it was just a handful of years ago was a very, I'll call it, sustained peace mindset. was a very, I'll call it sustained peace mindset,

and the Pentagon wanting to have more competition and therefore lower prices, which is all very good. And we still need that. But really as part of that was not the drive to go faster and to have a national push to catch up and get ahead of these threats. And what that might look like as you move into an environment like that is still the broad industrial base, still the multiple providers providing competition, but where do you not just streamline requirements, but where do you get the government involved in partnering with the industry to make these things happen.

And I don't know the details of the Rare Earth item. I'm just reading about it as you are. But I looked at that as a positive sign in terms of the government really wanting to be involved and partner with that provider to make this happen. I do want to swing back to the commercial piece of this, because you mentioned Amazon, Kyber. I don't know that investors fully understand or appreciate what that's going to mean as a competitor to Starlink, which right now is in many ways kind of dominating that marketplace.

How quickly is that constellation going to build out? How quickly can you launch it? Well, we're going to go as fast as we can and we're off to a great start. We got 54 up there just on the two atlases. The Kuiper Vulcans are going to go up, say, 45 at a time or so, depending on the orbits they go to.

And I don't want to speak for Amazon, but I can say there's a number that we're going to try and get them to in just a short span of time that allows the initial offering of service. And then as we continue to build it out, they can expand that to more and more people. And the really cool thing about, you know, my customer there, the Kuiper solution, is that they have the opportunity as coming second into the marketplace to try and jump ahead in performance and technology and offer a really attractive service. I won't go into the details because that's their show,

but I can tell you it will be the best system that there is when it's up and going. And I am trying to get first in line myself because I live out in the countryside and it's going to be amazing. So the mix of government versus commercial and then perhaps even international, how does that evolve? Yes, that's another great question because the Pentagon has sort of a vision that there's going to be the availability to leverage commercial activities in space, to not just have only the dedicated systems that are really uniquely configured, designed to do

really specialized and exotic government missions, but to also take the other things the Pentagon needs that are, I don't want to mundane, cause nothing in space is easy, but let's just say more common and more commercial and put some of those missions onto commercial platforms. So for example, routine communications or even lightly encrypted communications could absolutely be on a space-based telecommunication system that's primarily commercial and

the government is just one more customer. Hmm, and so you expect we're gonna see more and more of those types of dynamics take shape? I do because since you know remember how we talked about we got to go faster, we got to go faster, well one of the ways to go faster is to utilize systems that are already there. So what should we be watching for you, L.A., through the rest of this year and beyond? And I guess what are you watching more broadly looking at the space economy as it continues to take shape? Yeah, so for this year, this is our big year to get going. You know, I won't be launching 25 missions a year, the, you know, the full year of

every, you know, launching every two weeks, but I'll hit that tempo before the end of the year. And so we'll essentially be at that rate. And we're opening up multiple, we call them lanes at the launch site. So we have one launch pad at Cape Canaveral and we have one assembly building in Lane, if you will, or track that feeds it. Later this summer, you're gonna see us open a second track that feeds that same pad so that we're just alternating rockets down to the pad.

Cause you know, the rocket spends almost a month getting assembled and then it's really only on the pad for a couple of days. So that'll be just boom, boom, boom. And then as we get into the back half of the year, we'll have activated another Vulcan pad out in Vandenberg in California. So as we roll into next year, it's three lanes firing down that pad

and all three, you know, two pads, three lanes. And so we'll really be going pretty fast. And the other cool thing, Morgan, if you come out to the cave, you should let us know, because to do a rate like that, you start building up a stockpile of rockets so that they're in all stages of assembly, but even ones that are done.

The HIF, the big building that we used to assemble deltas in at Cape Canaveral is stacked full of rockets like cordwood. And that's just a sight that's never been seen before. OK, I'm going to take you up on that invitation very soon, because I'd like to see this with my own eyes. Finally, reusability. You and I have talked about it before. What is the path to reusability that you're on with Vulcan? Yeah, that's a great topic too because now that we

have the rocket, we can work on reusing it. You got to have the rocket. And we've had for a long time the plan to reuse the BE-4 rocket engines off the first stage. We've been sort of busily working away at that in the background while the bigger Vulcan was getting put together. So pretty soon we're gonna start conducting flight experiments where we separate those BE-4 rocket engines. We re-entered them behind this inflatable

hypersonic decelerator, which is a new technology we developed together with NASA, and then implementing that. But that's just the very beginning. We have other parts of the rocket that we know can be recovered and reused practically. All of this is done a little bit differently because of our high energy orbit architecture where we fly much higher and faster than other people do. That's why we recover engines and not the whole booster.

But there's a whole sequence of those. We've actually settled on the first two or three big ones, BE-4s and a couple more. And we're gonna enter into a kind of accelerated development on all of that. Maybe the next time we talk, if it's a little while in the future, I can tell you what those things are.

We're kind of keeping the next one secret for a little while, if it's a little while in the future, I can tell you what those things are. We're kind of keeping the next one secret for a little while, but it's going to be pretty cool. All right. Well, given the fact that we now have a cliffhanger and a tease to our next conversation, Tori Bruno, it's great to speak with you as always, CEO of United Launch Alliance. Thank you for joining me. Oh, anytime, Morgan. 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.