Closing Bell - Manifest Space: Vulcan’s Maiden Launch Announcement with United Launch CEO Tory Bruno 10/24/23

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

A new rocket is about to enter the space race. In an exclusive interview from CNBC’s Technology Executive Council summit, CEO Tory Bruno joins Morgan to announce Vulcan’s upcoming flight, its recent launch for Project Kuiper and the Israel-Hamas war’s implications for national security space.

A new rocket is about to enter the space race. United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur now has a date for its maiden flight. Just in time for Christmas. The Lockheed Martin-Boeing Joint Ventures heavy lift rocket has been years in the making and has suffered some setbacks and delays along the way, including a propellant tank mishap earlier this year. I spoke with ULA CEO Tori Bruno, who joined me exclusively from CNBC's Technology Executive Council Summit to discuss Vulcan's upcoming flight, that recent

launch for Amazon's test satellites of Project Kuiper, and what the Israel-Hamas war could mean for national security space. I'm Morgan Brennan, and this is Manifest Space. I want to start with the fact that the clock is ticking. We're in the final quarter of the year and Vulcan, maiden flight, do you have a date? We do. We're going on the 24th of December. The 24th of December, so Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve. My family's coming down. We're going on the 24th of December. The 24th of December, so Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve. My family's coming down. We're going to have Christmas Eve at Cocoa Beach. Wow.

Okay, so what needs to happen for this date to reach the history books? We need to finish building our upper stage and ship it down there. There's some qualification testing in parallel. Both of those get done in November. The boosters already there are ready to go. And the reason it's Christmas Eve is because of science, orbital mechanics. We have two payloads. We have a commercial lunar lander built by Astrobotics,

the first commercial lander to go to the moon. And we have a non-separating payload from Celestis, which does memorials, like being buried at sea, for example. But it's the lunar mission that drives it. They're going to a part of the moon where they need very carefully controlled lighting conditions, and then they also have to stay in radio communication with the deep space network, which are giant receivers and transmitters here on Earth. And when you put the two together, we just get a few days every month.

And so in this case, it'll be the 24th, 25th, 26th. If for some reason anything happens, bad weather, there's some delay in shipping the stage, we can move into January where there's another similar window. Okay. So when Vulcan comes online, assuming everything goes according to plan before the end of December, what does that mean in terms of your launch cadence? We'll be launching several times in 24, but when we get about halfway through 25, we'll be launching every two weeks, and so you'll see a steady ramp up. How quickly can you build these rockets? A little bit faster than that.

But actually, not a lot. And in fact, to keep up with that first part of the ramp when it's steep, we're building them already. If you came to Decatur, you'd see a whole assembly line of Centaur V stacked up in solid rocket motors at North of Grumman at my rocket motor supplier and so on through my supply chain to kind of get a running start at this so that when we get up to that full rate, eventually we catch up and do it steady state. And now what is this going to mean? I know

we've talked about it before, but to revisit, what is this going to mean in terms of the breakdown between government work and commercial work, especially since you did just have that milestone of launching the first two Amazon test Kuiper satellites to orbit as well. Well it does change the nature of our business and makes it a lot more balanced. Before we were probably about 80% government and now with our other commercial work and Amazon Kuiper constellation, it's about 50-50. And so that's a lot healthier place to be because when one is up, the other is still fine and vice versa really smooths it out for us.

How is everything post-launch with the Amazon satellites? Really good. So I can't talk about satellites because Amazon wants to do that, but I can tell you there's lots of smiles. And of course the launch was perfect. You know, we did publish our bullseyes. We put them exactly where they were supposed to be. And we're all pretty happy with it. Yeah. You are very heavily involved in national security with a lot of your government contracting with the U.S. We've seen this war in Israel erupt now, geopolitical landscape riskier than arguably

we've seen in a very long time. I just want to get your assessment on that and also what that's going to mean for the space domain. Yes, well, it makes that national security space mission all that much more critical because those are assets that allow us to understand what's going on. They allow us to have a presence that is calming and keeps the peace because space makes our forces much, much more effective. In fact, we've moved from the era where we needed space to be a force multiplier for terrestrial forces to a place where you can't really accomplish basic military effectiveness without it. So it really amps up that criticality. And when we look into the long range, there's a nice overlap with a customer like Amazon

because ramping up that launch rate also means that I've invested a lot of money and capability into our infrastructure which is available for the country writ large. Is your expectation that on the national security and the defense side demand is going to continue to grow? Absolutely. Being a launch guy you're actually at the end of that value chain and so you're able to look several years upstream and see the satellites being started and built and sort of watching them come at you. So in a way, it's like being able to look into the future. And we see that ramp up right now.

I mean, we saw it in real time, the role that space plays in terms of critical infrastructure here on Earth when Russia invaded Ukraine. Is that, are there lessons that have been learned from there? Is there a scenario in terms of protecting that infrastructure that now plays out as we see other conflicts occurring? Yeah, absolutely. There's a handful of big lessons that came out of that. One, that you can really leverage commercial infrastructure and assets in ways that people hadn't imagined. Two, that makes them a target for the adversary. And then three, the government has to have a model by which if they're going to leverage commercial infrastructure, they understand what it'll do, when it'll be available, they

can count on it when they need it. And likewise, companies, they got to know that they can be protected and that their business can't evaporate the next day because the adversary significantly damaged their infrastructure. Finally, the role that AI is going to play in all of this, whether it's on the production lines, whether it's in terms of securing data that is space-based, how are you implementing those capabilities? How do you think it evolves? Yeah, so I think of AI today as automation for intellectual tasks, doing for the knowledge worker what robotics do in the factory.

And in this environment we've just been discussing, this is a technology intensive world. It's all about the rocket scientists, the orbital mechanics people, satellite designers. It's really, really more heavily technology focused than other industries. AI is the thing that allows those people to take what might seem sophisticated and exotic for the average person, but is drudgery for them off their plate and allows them to focus on the things that are really high value. And because they have that

extra time and focus, they can do more, more creativity, more innovation than we're able to do today. AI is going to be transformative in this way. So they become more productive. Do you see AI then in terms of how you're going to use it and how that grows at ULA being a net grower of jobs within your workforce or a subtractor? Absolutely. We've put the business on a trajectory that is really focused on that growth. And in some ways, it's not going to be practically obtained without these efficiencies, not just efficiencies in the factory, like building my upper stage with robots, but efficiencies in my knowledge workers that can keep up with all that for the technical work they do.

And with that, I think it'll accelerate our growth, and we're going to be able to do more things than we were able to do in the past. Tori Bruno of ULA, so great to speak with you. Thank you so much for joining me. 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.