Off-Nominal - 156 - It’s All Muscle (with Mark Peller, VP of Vulcan Development at ULA)

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

Jake and Anthony are joined by Mark Peller, VP of Vulcan Development at United Launch Alliance, to talk about…well…Vulcan development!TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 156 - It’s All Muscle (with Mark Peller, VP of Vulcan Development at ULA) - YouTubeUnited Launch Alliance Successfully Launches First Next Generation Vulcan RocketTory Bruno on X: “Hmm. What’s that? Could it be a second Vulcan mobile launch platform on its way to the new VIF for final assembly?”Tory Bruno on X: “By popular demand, here’s some photos of the construction at SLC3 at Vandenberg to convert the pad for Vulcan. (Classic Vandy “June Gloom”). Currently on track to be completed early next year, several months ahead of our first West Coast Vulcan.”ULA on X: “#ULARocketShip and #VulcanRocket are on the move! Soon, the #Cert2 booster and Centaur V will be arriving in Cape Canaveral, Florida ahead of its launch planned later this year.”Tory Bruno on X: “Atlases, Atlases, Atlases… Mighty #AtlasV is stacking up like cord wood at the Cape…”Building 5, Atlas Assembly Line | FlickrFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Well, Jake, it would not be a rocket show if there weren't some late-in-the-count issues that I was working there because I did not hit the right buttons. So I made it. We made it. You're good. We're here. How you doing? I'm excellent.

I'm excited to be here. We got Mark Peller joining us from United Launch Alliance. We're going to talk about Vulcan Centaur. By the way, awesome poster in the background. Perfect placement. Did you have like a videographer set this up for you and just like... there was a little bit of pre-positioning of Vulcan swag yeah good good all right well we'll owe a drink to the the marketing person that helped you with that one

we got to get one of those ULA post-launch graphics of like how close to the center you got and just for video swag like right down the money line yeah absolutely that's awesome yeah so we're going to talk about Vulcan today. I think it's an awesome time to talk about Vulcan because we've got some distance from the first flight and so there's probably some learnings we can go over. And then I feel like things are now brewing up and getting ready for flight too. So I'm really happy with like the positioning of this interview. I think it's a good spot temporally to talk about this. That's going to be good. So should we start with some drinks though, Anthony? Did you get anything fun today? Yep. Somewhere around here is my just.

I'm cooking up the gin and tonic today. I've had too much wine lately. I figured I got to spruce it up a little bit. It's like 8,000 degrees here in Philadelphia this week. And I just need to get into my limes. Limes are nice and hefty this time of the year. Look at that thing. That's good.

It's been a good week. I went to the Phillies game yesterday. My son ran the bases. So I may just be repairing a little bit of the heat exhaustion that I had by way of gin and tonics. That's it. That's what I got. Mark, did they give you instructions or did you bring something fun to show? Oh, yes.

I brought something. So I actually have some Vulcan beer here. Oh. Goes for launch. Yes. Perfect name. Perfect name. Yep the axle.

Let me go and wrap it around here. Oh, man. Vulcan graphics. This is the, this is legit. Yeah, by the way, off-screen Vulcan models as well. This is excellent. Yes. The whole thing, Jake.

But obviously, as you can tell, I am in the office, so I will stay that for after I get home. And so right now for the interview, I'm drinking my usual rocket fuel here around here, which keeps me going in the environment, which is Diet Coke. So love it. Upper and downers today. I'm rocking a very common tourist beer from down here. here. So this is the Tulum, Tulum lager. So if you've ever been to Touloum and you're like, I want to see what kind of beer are they making Tulum? This is probably the one you had. That's the one.

And it's got a turtle on it. I love turtles. So there we go. That's what I'm rocking today. And it's got this cool. I just got the sticker on it. It says small batches. That's how you know it's authentic. It's legit. They have a budget enough to print those. That's how small the batches. Small batch, big budget. That's how it goes, right? Oh, man. Cool. All right. So yeah, I guess I'm trying to figure where to start with this. So maybe we can we can start with like kind of rolling back to flight one. Because like I said, we've got some distance between us and this first flight now. We're five, five months, six months behind it now. So I'm really kind of curious just to hear your perspective about how the rocket did. I mean, and maybe I just say maybe you should introduce yourself too. What is your job? And why are we asking you about Vulcan Centaur is probably a good question. And then, yeah, you know, how would, are you feeling about Flight 1 now that you've poured over the data? Sure. So my responsibilities, as you said in the beginning, are Vulcan development and advanced programs.

So I've led the Vulcan program from day one. I was, I worked at ULA since ULA was formed, but I was Vulcan employee number one. It wasn't called Vulcan, I didn't have a name for it. We had an internal, you know, code work for it, if you will. but basically picked up this idea from our advanced programs team at the time and was charged with, you know, building a program and then executing the development of Vulcan. And so anyway, yeah, in a good position here today to give you an update of where we are here as we get past first flight and look toward second flight and look toward ramping up our launch tempo. We've got all the context. 100% of the context is in your brain. So that's good.

And so yeah, so flight one then. So like I'm curious to know, maybe here's the question we'll start with this. What's the biggest lessons learned from Flight 1? Like what is the thing that you didn't know before that you know now that stands out is like really important as to, you know, along the development journey of Vulcan. Like what's the most important lesson you got out of it? Yeah. Flight 1 was incredible. clean for a first flight. Obviously, we put a tremendous, our approach to things, we put a

tremendous amount of work into doing all the testing we could on the ground, whether that was bench level testing of components, subsystem testing, system level testing, analysis, and other simulation, but still, until you fly, there's just certain things you can't test

to simulate. So you know you're going to learn. You're just doing everything you can to make sure that you can fly through that learning. and still have a successful outcome. But the mission was, you know, not just, you know, incredibly successful, but it was incredibly clean for a first flight. First, we set the bar really high for ourselves. You know, we just didn't go a quick short mission to Leo.

We sent, obviously, Paragon on a course for the moon. Then after we separated that, we coasted for about half an hour, restarted the upper stage, and then we kept the upper stage active, just, you know, holding its attitude, and telemetering data for several hours, just to get more data on the performance of that and its readiness to take on even more stressful missions. We also, when I say it was clean,

it wasn't for a lack of looking for potential problems. It was a heavily instrumented vehicle being for first flight. So there's lots of little, you know, small observations, things that didn't quite align with predictions that we'll go back and update our model and roll that learning into future missions, but no anomalies to speak of. Boost your performance, first stage performance

was really close to predictions. We actually, I think Tori's talked about this before, boost phase of flight was about shut down about one and a half seconds earlier than predicted, just to put that perspective, it's over 300 second nominal burn. So still really close, but overall, we were flying hot.

In other words, propulsion system performance was a little bit above predictions prior to that. So those all netted out. So that's kind of a sleeper. It's not super exciting, but that was probably the most significant finding we had. And we understand the cause and we made some minor changes to the vehicle. And now we fly it and are all ready for our next mission. So a lot of good data. But remarkably clean, nothing that came out of first. are, you know, ready to go fly again and we're ready to go fly again here in a few months. Do you almost like, I almost wonder if there's that, that, you know, such a clean flight can make you, like, a little bit nervous because it's like, in some ways, you kind of want to shake out the gremlins, like, right away. It's like, you know, there's probably something and you want to get it out. And then it doesn't appear for the first flight.

So you just kind of have to go to the second flight. Is there a, maybe it's like sacrilegious to even suggest this. But is there sort of a thing in the back of mind that's just like, what did we miss? Like what problem didn't crop up? Yeah, we certainly don't take the performance of cert one for granted. We understand this is a new system just because we have one flight under our belt doesn't assure that we're going to have a successful second flight. And to be honest, whether this is the second flight or the hundredth flight,

we don't take any of our for granted. And, you know, the new rocket, this rocket doesn't, have any history. It doesn't know about how the rockets before it flew. We need to always put that same level of rigor into our preparations for a mission. But even more so here on introduction of a new system, not just for the second flight, but for the fifth flight, 10th flight, we're looking at it very carefully because each mission's different. We fly the vehicle in a different way to support unique requirements of the mission. We fly it. Different places. We fly within, you know,

different corners of the operating box. So just because you flew successfully before, you're doing something different. May not be significantly different, but it's different. And these are high energy systems that operate with small margins. And so those small differences can be significant. So we're not taking anything for granted. So we very carefully analyzed all our results from the first flight. We've gone back and updated all of our predictions and models.

That's reflected in fairly minor changes to how we, we'll fly the vehicle for the next mission and a handful, but it's really just a handful of minor hardware changes. Okay. So it certainly exceeded, you know, my expectations, but like you said, we're going to make sure we still apply that same level of rigor to the upcoming missions that we did for the inaugural mission. Good.

Are the hardware changes on ULA's end, like the tankage or the structures or something like that? Yeah, we made some minor changes to the booster. parts of the booster that we're responsible for. And there's a couple components that we went back and tested to a little bit higher environment. So what we saw, you know, we do our best to predict the environments, whether it's, you know, vibration or thermal or other operating conditions for individual components, the rocket valves, avionics boxes, things like that. You literally have hundreds of those on the vehicle.

And there's always, not surprisingly, there was a handful where we had some small exceedances of what we had predicted. Not, didn't exceed what we had tested to previously on the ground, but had exceeded to what we had predicted. So we went back and did some additional testing and some minor design changes. But this rocket we're going to fly here in a few months is very, very, very similar to the one we flew on the inaugural mission. Not nothing really significantly different about it. When you're talking about the, you're talking about the overperformance of the,

first stage that you were a second and a half off or whatever. What is what was the through the lifetime of Atlas? Like what was the mission to mission variability? Is there is it percentage based or you know, what metric do you look at when you have a hundred and some to look at and you're comparing against each mission or is it like dead on every time that you're nailing it exactly the same on each flight? Well, there's various sources of various sources of variation if you will, in the integrated performance of the rocket. And so you go into the first time a lot of uncertainty as to how those systems will perform. And so you have larger error bands, if you go on your predictions. And you need to make sure that you account for those so that if

everything stacks up on the low side, that you still have the performance to meet the basic mission requirements. So the advantage of when you, as you fly more, You get more data that you can analyze and you can reduce that uncertainty, and therefore you can plan on extracting more of that performance, counting on more of that performance. That's certainly where the position we're in on Atlas and position we're on Delta, which obviously just recently flew out. And so with more flight data, with Vulcan, we'll get there as well. One of the biggest sources of pre-flight variation, if you will, on our predictions here

is really just because it's the first time it's flown. So there's some things that just getting one flight of data dramatically reduces some uncertainties and helps us with our predictions for future missions. So that was a big step function, if you will, in our learning. And then going forward here, we'll add to that with just, you know, more increasing the sample size, more data operating over more of the run box of the vehicle, if you will, and just getting more and more accurate in our predictions. But in all cases, we're going to make sure that we cover those ranges and we always, you know, deliver our customers' payload to where it needs to go. Yeah. I'm curious to know how you felt about the propellant on this, because, I mean, you guys are going through something that SpaceX is also going through and relativity is going through is that, you know, it's a new propellant on this date. You know, it's not new, new, new, but like there aren't really a lot of propulsion systems that are using this and now all of a sudden they're everywhere.

So I'm just kind of curious to hear like how did the how was working with methane? This is kind of a thing I have with propellants like hydrogen is tough to work with, for example. You know, there's lots of quirks with working with a hydrogen system. But what's methane like? How did you like it? How are you feeling about the future of that as a, as a, you know, a foundation of your vehicle? Also, how did it smell? And how did it smell?

Yeah. Personally sample it. Yeah, there has certainly been learning. There's been learning, you know, for both United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin in development of the VE4 engine. And so, you know, we've gone through a lot of that together over the years. We have the benefit of a lot of experience with cryogenic fuels, as you said, liquid hydrogen on the upper stages and liquid hydrogen on the Delta 4 booster. So we had a lot of experience with cryogenic fuels and large cryogenic boosters. But just as you noted, you know, hydrogen has its own quirks and methane has its own quirks as well. And while methane is used extensively in commercial industry, you know, we're a very large consumer of hydrogen when we went and flew a Delta four rocket in this nation. But the rocket industry right now, at least, is a very small consumer of methane or commercial liquefied natural gas. There's lots of applications. So there was this large industrial base with experience, but that was experience in how you

store and distributed on the ground, not how you fly it in a rocket. And so there's been learning. And that came out of obviously engine development for Blue Origin and for us. That came out of a lot of the ground system testing that we did leading up to first launch. And so before the first flight vehicle ever showed up, we built, we called a Pathfinder booster. So it was a flight configuration booster with engines. We didn't hot fire it. And about two years before this launch, we took that. down on the launch site, we did a series of tanking tests and wet dress rehearsals. And we learned a lot. It changed our procedures for how we load propellant on the vehicle.

We got a better understanding of how it behaves. And so it changed how we plan to fly the vehicle. And it actually resulted in hardware changes, both the airborne and ground systems. But we did that a couple years ago. We didn't hot fire it, so it kind of flew under the radar. But a lot of really important learning came out of that. So as a result, we went into the first launch campaign, which also was preceded by tanking tests and a flight readiness firing. When we actually got down with Peregrine, with the payload on the vehicle, went out to the pad for our first launch, everything went really smoothly as a result. No issues unique. No issues came up that were unique to methane or liquefied natural gas. And as you know, obviously, we were able to launch on our first attempt at the opening of a window.

So we're continuing to learn, but I think the steep portion of that learning curve is behind us. That was the part that kind of impressed me most because I know when we were, you know, thinking through this first flight and what we thought would happen, and we're always trying to predict the future and see what would happen. I was thinking about SLS and how much, you know, trouble they had kind of getting to that first launch. There was a lot of kind of false steps as they were getting the feeling underway with all the stages, right? and I just was kind of thinking like, man, this is Eula's first, you know, rocket that they built all in their own, and it's a brand new fuel type. There's got to be some, like, we're going to have some gremlins on the pad for sure. Like, there's no way this is going to go like super, super smooth.

And it did. And so it's always a, I'm, I don't think about that. Yeah. Like, what did I miss? How did I? I don't know. I'm just confused with that. So that other question for Mark was actually a question for your own personal sanity.

Yeah, exactly. Help me figure out how I screwed this up in my end. So wrong. One of the things I was curious about with the methane question, I had heard from when Terran 1 made its way out to the launch pad that the keepout zone and the hazard zone that was established surrounding that launch was bigger than Falcon Heavy's because methane had not been characterized to whatever the modeling they used to define those down at the Cape. Was that still the case with Vulcans or did Terran 1 really like trailblazed that a bit and

models got pulled in and it wasn't as big of an issue because I understood it was like freaking some people out. I'm not sure if that's maybe I was hearing wild stuff but maybe there was anything like that going on. You are accurate. So we are still working together with the space force and partner defense to characterize methane for use as a rocket fuel to establish those keepout zones. We kind of take for granted all the work that was done in the 60s you know, for hydrogen and RP1 and the other store bolt propellants to characterize them to establish those keepout zones. And liquefied natural gas was, or methane was unique here. We with the ULA with the Space Force has did a fair amount of testing to help characterize that,

but there's more work to do. So we've made progress in, you know, reducing the clear zone, if you will, but comparative to our other heritage vehicles, it is still large, and that's something that we're going to have to work together. All the users of the range that are flying methane rockets along with the space force are going to have to work together to get down to something that's more reasonable so that we can all operate at a reasonable operational tempo.

If we're clearing half the cape for one of us to go launch the rocket, obviously the other operator aren't getting any production. No one's thrilled. Yeah, none of you were working on small vehicles right now. It's like Vulcan, New Glens, Starship. They're all monsters. So this would not be a great scenario. Exactly.

So there's more work to come, but we're making progress. Listen, I mean, I was going to say, there's one way to solve this. Like, let's take one of these out to the desert and just go for it. You know, we can establish this real quick. Someone else may be collecting data. They may have collected some data like that that would be useful. Yeah, there's a. You know, it's a thing.

That's out there. Just, you know, lay one out there and get a sniper and just take it out to see, to see, you know, the blasts on it. It's a really straightforward, it's a really straightforward experiment. We can help with that. We could probably give you some ideas. Outside the state of Florida, please. Oh, my God.

Maybe your greatest moment on this podcast is a ULA sniper shout out. That is incredible. Man. There's portions of internet history that I just totally forget. and love to. Speaking of that, though, here's a question I've got on the run-up to the first launch.

You know, people on Twitter, people like us, we all latch on to storylines. So, we latch on to where are the engines, the picture that Eric Berg got of the Centaur test with fire towering out of the facilities.

We latch on to things that are visible and that are knowable. And in most scenarios, the people are actually working on stuff are not concerned at all, all about those things, they're concerned about other things. So what was the, were any of those things that we latched onto also keeping you up at night? And if not, what was the thing that you were most worried about on the run-up to first launch? No, those were, the two things you cited

were pretty significant. We nailed it. Yeah, those were big. The Centaur, you know, we had anomalies with testing a Centaur at NASA Marshal Space Flight Center in March of last year. we were on pace to fly Vulcan probably middle of last year. And so that was a setback. And we've talked about the corrective action that we had to roll into the design of Centaur, the learning that came out of that anomaly in there, the corrective action. And we recovered from that. So by the time we got down the launch site, I mean, I wasn't worrying about at that point.

You know, that obviously created a lot of sleepless nights in the, you know, late winter and spring of last year and early summer as we worked through it and trying to figure out what our path forward was. But once we figured out what had happened and how we were going to recover from it, when we finally got down the launch site with the flight configuration Centaur, that wasn't something that was keeping me up at night. Similarly, as you mentioned, getting through engine development and getting flight engines delivered was something that was getting a lot of attention in the media and it was getting a lot of attention here because that was one of the pacing items as well of getting to first flight.

There's just, you know, there was probably six of pressure and sleepless nights for me because every phase of development has its own unique challenges. And, you know, we've encountered many setbacks that over the years that we had to overcome. But when we finally got down to the launch site, you know, I had, I had no regrets. So we had done everything that was reasonable and that we should have done to be ready to go fly that. The outcome is never assured, as we talked about, no matter how hard you test and simulate in the ground. It's never quite the same as flying. And we operate, as I said, very high energy systems where small problems can quickly cascade into and manifest themselves in significant events.

But like all that hard work and investment, you know, paid off. we had as we talked about a very clean first flight. Yeah, yeah. I want to ask about the future now, as we are, you know, moving on from flight one. The biggest questions I have about Vulcan are not so much related to like the individual vehicle per se about, you know, what changes you're making to the flight two or anything like that. But I'm really curious to know about scale because this seems to be, to me, seems like it's going to be the toughest problem for you guys to solve, right?

Is that you get into second, third flight, whatever. But like you have to make a lot of rockets pretty fast here. And we're going to be moving ULA into like a paradigm that's different, you know. And that takes a lot of work and a lot of smart thinking. So I'm curious to know about your strategy as sort of like the leader of the development of this, is how do you put together a system that can make as many Vulcans as you're going to need to satisfy the DoD and satisfy Amazon and then all the other customers that you're going to have. How do you approach a problem like that?

Yeah, when we started on Vulcan development, we never expected to be this successful from a commercial project given the sale. I'll just be really honest. We had traditionally been a national security provider. National security is still the cornerstone of our business and the Vulcan rocket and the way we operate is still all revolves around supporting those unique requirements. requirements of those very important missions for national security. And we flew, you know, on average 10 times a year, you know, give or take. The market changed, you know, demands for national security space launch increased.

And obviously, we've seen a dramatic growth in the commercial market. And we found that the system that we had developed, it was developed obviously, originally to support all the markets, commercial, civil, and national security was a good fit not just for national security but for commercial and civil as well and so we've had this you know very successful um in the sales of the rocket you know seven backlog of 70 before it ever flown which is really heard of those are kind of numbers you hear in the commercial airplane business when like Boeing or Airbus introduces a new a new aircraft um and so if you're if you're if you're going public via spec you might put that kind of number out there that was a thing for a

I'm going to leave. I don't one this year, four next year, and then 60. So, you know. So kind of is industrial approach for supply chain and for production and for launch. And so we've been over the last couple years, and we're getting toward the finish line here, have made really significant investments in increasing our production capacity, both in our supply chain, with the people to build those engines and motors and other key parts in our factory in northern Alabama in Decatur.

We've just finished adding about 500,000 square feet to that factory, so it's just over 2.1 million square feet, which is, as far as we know, the largest rocket factory in the free world under one roof. And similarly at the launch site, we finished modifying the Atlas pad at the East Coast, slick 41 to be able to accommodate Vulcan. It's actually backward compatible to Atlas. But what we're going forward there to build upon that is we are creating a second vertical processing facility or VIF vertical integration facility and a second mobile launch platform or Vulcan launch platform, as we call it a VLP.

And yeah, you're showing some pictures of the initial structure for VLP number two. So what that gives us is the opportunity to have what we call two processing lanes. We can be processing two vehicles and two vertical integration facilities on two VLPs in parallel in firing off the same pad because the choke point isn't the pad. We only spend a day or two out there per mission. It's really where we do all the vertical processing to stack the rocket, check it out, make the payload to it. So that by itself just doubles your rate capabilities with that additional infrastructure.

But from the beginning, we were designing Vulcan with requirements to reduce. reduce the amount of we call span time necessary to process it from one mission to the other. Even if our launch rate didn't demand that, we wanted to have more flexibility because we realized that longers don't show up evenly distributed over the course of year. They tend to group themselves. And so getting our span times down was really important. And now with doubling our launch infrastructure on the East Coast, it provides us a path in the near term here to getting to a launch rate of about 20.

25 per year. And that's what we're on track to do. In addition, on the West Coast, obviously don't launch out there for a company, but we're in the middle of modifying the heritage Atlas facility, and there are some pictures of Slick 3 at Bannberg's Base Force Base. It's kind of torn up right now. Yeah, a lot of holes in the ground as we prepare it.

But we're working to get all the mods for Vulcan complete out there by the end of this year, the construction and principle complete. And then we'll spend the first quarter of next year checking it out. And we have two important missions on the manifest next year out there for the Space Force that we're looking to getting the first launch of Vulcan off in support of. Yeah. I guess with Delta done now, you can start swallowing up that infrastructure. There's just some stuff you can start retiring and fully converting over to Vulcan now, yeah?

Yeah, absolutely. At the launch site, you know, we safe and secure those pads and are turning those back over to the Space Force. Those don't play, it's like 37 on the East Coast and slick six on the West Coast don't play in our future plans, which is, you know, pads are big and complicated and they take up a lot of resources. So focusing Vulcan and our remaining Atlas missions on two pads, one on each coast, is really a benefit to us. The biggest benefit that we get is in two places. It's in our factory. So we've been producing, if you went back just two years ago, we were producing three lines of rockets in there. You know, we had Atlas and full rate production. Delta was starting to slow down as that program tailed off, and Vulcan was ramping up.

So now Delta is built out. Atlas is going to be built out by the end of this year. And in some places, we're already done. Certain portions of the factory, their work on Atlas has already done. And so that enables us to dedicate more of that factory force to Volta. And as I said, we just added another 500 square feet, 500,000 square feet to it. So we are not taking any chances. We're hitting this with a hammer,

making sure we have all the infrastructure that we need to support that higher rate. And then the other area where it really benefits is, you know, back here at the Design Center where the bulk of our engineering support is and just being able to focus, whether it's engineering or quality or supply chain, focusing around one product, which is highly common across all the missions that we fly,

and helping to get our, rate up and improve our efficiencies and not, you know, spreading our effort across multiple products, which was always a challenge we had at ULA. Atlas and Delta served us very well. And obviously Atlas continued to do, continues to do so. But Atlas and Delta each had their own kind of unique niche that they supported. And we needed both of those to support the full range of our customer's missions. And so that was really the opportunity we had with Vulcan was to develop, you know, one rocket that

supported that full range of missions and did everything that Atlas and Deltza did in some cases, you know, doing it quite a bit better, but do it with one launch system. And that was kind of always the dream, since ULA was formed, took a few years to get there a little bit longer than we had where we are now. And it's positioned us, I feel, for a really bright future. Yeah. Yeah. Can you talk about why the, I'll go out, Jake. I was just complete aside, but I sent some pictures to Anthony to show because I saw this tweet from Tori Bruno showing the rest of those atlases being built.

And it was a cool factory shot because they're all kind of lined up. And it reminded me of the original 1960s Atlas factory when they were producing the original one like, you know, on mass because they had to like satisfy whatever ballistic missile contracts they had back then. And so this was just a nostalgic photo for me to see. So you see this one.

And then yeah, this is like the OG like from the 1960s, right? That's so many rockets in a row. That's the Conveyor plant in San Diego building. Exactly, yeah, San Diego. For internecocontinental ballistic missiles, you know, to address the threat at the time. And so, you know, similarly, we're ramping up partly to address a threat for national security as well.

And there you can see those are, those four rockets are actually down at the launch site. That is in the HIF at Complex 37. And if you look to a picture of the factory, in final assembly, there's an equal number of those nose to tail. And so, you know, we are busy ramping up production across both product lines. Yeah. That's kind of make it difficult, too. I don't know if this is a question, but just thinking that through, like, trying to ramp up

a brand new rocket that quickly while also spinning down to other rockets is like, I don't know, it's no small operational challenge. I don't envy you guys having to do all that at the same time. Yeah, it is certainly a challenge. You know, as the person who led the development of Vulcan, one of the things that we greatly benefited from is we had this large team of people who had an extensive amount of experience,

you know, building and launching rockets. And so that was, you know, that fed into everything, thing that fed in the design of the rocket fed into the system for producing it and launching it. Yeah. On the launch site thing that you mentioned, I'm curious now being on this side of the first launch, looking back, was it the right decision to cross over with the Atlas pads, or do you wish you would have crossed over with the Delta pads? I don't know what the envisioned kind of like fade out was with Atlas, and I know getting

down to one pad was, I don't. I don't know if you expected all of the nine remaining ones to be bought on a single day, and maybe that was going to be a longer crossover than is currently looking like. But what was the intrinsic decision driver there for which pad to go with for Vulcan? You saw me roll my eyes a little bit when you asked the question. You know, from the day ULA was formed, and, you know, we had two strong cultures with the Atlas and Delta Heritage. And we always, over the years, face these challenges whenever we had to figure out a common way to do things or a common place to do things. And we got past a lot of that, obviously.

But then Vulcan brought a whole new series of decisions up. For instance, what pad were we going to launch it out of? And so those decisions were made many years ago and weren't without controversy. We made the right decisions, absolutely. I'm a former Delta guy. I worked on Delta IV development. I was a Delta 4 chief engineer, but nevertheless, you know, picking the Atlas facilities for launch for the right decisions. And a lot of it had to do with Delta 4, the infrastructure at 37 and 6 to support the Delta 4 heavy is pretty extensive.

And just the, and was pretty extensive and not necessarily a great fit for this single core high-performing heavy lift vehicle. And so it was more straightforward to modify the facility, the Atlas facility. facilities, less effort week to week month and month to maintain those facilities just because of their scale. So we made the right decisions, but nevertheless, it wasn't a decision that came easily. The challenge that we had, that we didn't foresee, was trying to modify an active launchpad on the East Coast. and we designed all these systems, we built all these parts, we hired, you know, contractors,

and it took us many years to do it because it was characterized by just a series of fits and starts. So you'd mobilize, you know, the construction crew and they, you know, get two weeks or three weeks, go quick, right after an Atlas launch. And then you would have to stand down. And because you're launching a rocket, you're not just have to stand down, but you're like, take all your equipment. equipment, your cranes and clear it out of here because we go get back to the Yeah. So it wasn't the most efficient way to do things, but it was the only way to do it. And we were able to actually, you know, build a pad on the East Coast that without too much

effort is easily reconfigurable between Atlas and Vulcan and the mobile launch platform and having one for each configuration rocket was really a key enabler of that. of that makes modifying Vandenberg much more straightforward because we've flown at Atlas. We're not trying to modify an active launch pad. The mods we roll in don't have to be backward compatible. And we just have the benefit of going through doing this a second time and the learning we got from the East Coast. Yeah, yeah. You like to just be honest though.

You like the launch pad that's closer to the water. You just like the one right up on the coast. You don't like being out on a kind of like causeway adjacent area, you know, too many mosquitoes and flies and stuff. Yeah, Slick 37 is cool in that respect. You can stand up on the deck and watch the waves. Love it. It's all about location, Jake. Yeah, it is.

Yeah, always is. Should we talk about smart reuse? Everyone's burning, burning question is, you know, there's kind of been this like on again, off again relationship with smart reuse. It like wasn't there and then it kind of was there and then it went away and then it came back and, you know, it's back with a vengeance now. How is that going, you know, I guess maybe tied to this as how is B.E.4 doing, like, you know, the performance of that.

And how do you see that all transitioning into a world where you might be able to reuse these things? Yeah, it's never gone away. We may have not been tweeting about it. Maybe. Yeah. But, you know, we've been working at a steady cadence in the background. first, you know, to develop and validate the basic underlying technology. And the lofted experiment, which I'm sure you're familiar with,

we deployed a high ad, the inflatable arrow shield, or hiad stands for hypersonic inflatable aerodynamic decelerator. That's a bit of a mouthful. But doing that on a representative scale, that was a major advancement in terms of demonstrating the basic technology, of which is key to our concept. You know, so our concept is, you know, non-proculsive, downrange recovery of the most valuable elements, you know, call it the engine section of the booster or the boatail where the engines and all the other really critical systems live. And that's always, you know, been our concept.

The high ad was key to it. So we've moved beyond, you know, some of the basic technology demonstration to figuring out how we actually modify Vulcan. to integrate these systems and to put us on a path in the next few years to do some test flights of it. So that's where we're on right now. We're working toward a critical design review, which is a major milestone later this year on a modified Vulcan booster with those systems. And then beyond that, we plan to move into some test flights to demonstrate this on the full scale. you know, everyone, there's different approaches to reuse, and I get a lot of questions about why your approach is better than someone else's. And what people need to understand is there's no right or necessarily wrong answer.

You can have a wrong answer. I'll say that, but there's multiple right answers in that you need to consider the architecture of the rocket and how the rocket flies. And for Vulcan, a really high performing booster, I mean, when we stage, you know, we go really far down range, really high altitude, a very high energy state. We're screaming. And we're not flying that rocket back to the launch site. Let's just be really clear. It's not going around again.

It might be cheaper to do that. The idea of trying to boost back to the launch head or even do a propulsive landing, you know, it significantly impacts the performance that we can offer to the primary mission in delivering a spacecraft to orbit. So this whole idea of downrange, non-proculsive recovery was something we were really interested in the high ad was something that enabled that. It's interesting, too, when you compare that to what I thought was an excellently stated, like, honest take, which was, listen, we didn't know where the commercial market would be when we were designing this thing. We knew where the national security market would be a little bit.

like you do have to pair these things with the company's internal goals and the and the framework that's it's operating in and like the design specs and the job that it serves and I feel like for all the airplane analogies that we at large want to throw around with rockets like there's also really differently shaped airplanes that have different jobs and I'm not sure like my whole thing has been like you know you can't

really go out and buy a commercial F-16 like that's not really a thing but that doesn't mean F-16s are bad and shouldn't exist So I'm fine with job specialization, and I really want that to be the case. So to kind of like throw out the utility of something like smart reuse, I find silly for people that want to be like, you know, it's all or nothing. You know, something is better than nothing in my eyes. And certainly when you're looking at specifically designing Vulcan to fly quicker between flights and have more turnaround and a larger capacity, you know, those are the things that you're optimizing around. So it makes a lot of sense from that regard, for sure. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. And like your whole, I mean, you've said this to it, but the whole stage is very fast. And that's part of the design. And that's related to Centaur, because centaur's, you know, where Centaur is at its best is higher up and going faster to start with. Like, you know,

it doesn't have the kind of like heft of a Falcon 9 upper stage where that, you know, that big engine on there where it can kind of like take over the load in the middle of the flight, you know. So I think it, I don't know, I do. see those criticisms a lot? Like, why wouldn't you try and save the booster or, or like you said,

Anthony, it's all or nothing? And if it's, if it's not all of it, then you're, you're a bad person. I see that sometimes. But it's like, I don't know, this is, this is the architecture that works, like, it's been demonstrated to work. And so why wouldn't you want to try and, and apply some sort of, like, good, you know, some sort of reusable practice to that. It seems, I don't know, it seems smart to me, smart. Got there. All right. No, that's cool. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, excited to hear that you're that, but that's a sooner timeline than I was expecting you to answer. So a CDR later this year and then possibly some test flights coming up like pretty quick. That's, I'm happy to hear that.

That's exciting to hear about. That's the path we're on. Yeah. Cool. It's, you know, we'll start out with test flights and we'll learn from those and iterate the design. So it's, you know, an operational capability is sometime beyond that. But we, we want to get in and, uh, and demonstrate it at full scale and learn.

How did you go about that work, though, like with the version of Vulcan that is flying now, right, is working towards the direction where there's a complex, somewhat wild structure between the engines and the tanks? Like, how did you factor that into? Yeah, like, how do you factor that into the version of the rocket that doesn't have an inflatable heat shield between it and the tankage? Yeah, so it's a real, without going in too much detail, it's a huge packaging challenge.

And you've got a group of really smart folks who've been working on this and iterating multiple times and some real innovation that you'll see, you know, when we go forward here. But the rocket on the outside looks the same. I'll tell you that much. It looks the same. It's the same height. but inside and back end it's it's very different to be able to make those systems separable and as you said to be able to have that inflatable arrow shield ready to deploy it looks the same that'll get the flat earthers going like that thing didn't come off that rocket that went up there

and the things just cut it's like a different thing that was set up there to make us feel like it was coming back in that's well that's the whole benefit of having something that's inflatable it's a very large structure but it can be you know packaged into a really tight area and that's a real advantage that we have. Please tell us you're going to put some backward facing cameras on this, on this first Vulcan that does this because we got a lots of cameras. I guess that's going to be a wild video. I'm pumped for that.

Yeah. Now, even just like the engineering challenge of like, because you got to, you got to cut plumbing or separate plumbing somehow, right? That's going from the tank to the engine. And that, that just seems like a hard thing to do. Just to like really quickly in flight, like, sever those lines and then in a way that you can then reuse them later, right?

I don't see. Yes and no. It's not without precedent. Maybe it's not something that's been done recently. But the original Atlas and Atlas, you know, it was a stage and a half. And, you know, you jettison the two outboard engines and you had the sustainer that continued on. Not that anyone currently working on the program. now is around

when that was default. But also, you know, if you take a step back and look at it, that's, you know, the space shuttle, right? You had your tank

and your main propulsion system in two different elements of the vehicle with the orbiter to ET umbilicals and which I actually worked on earlier in my career. So, you know,

these problems have been addressed before. They're not pushing stay of the art. There's not new technology that needs to be developed. It's just good. sound engineering. And, you know, we've looked back about how it's done before and we'll see where we can use some of that and come up with some new ways. And if there's any been, you know,

advancements in technology that we can apply. So we're actually pretty far along and figuring out how that's all going to work. But that's also something we talk about that's not easily simulated on the ground. You can simulate separation test, but it's never quite the same of being in a vacuum in a very dynamic environment as a booster burns out and you're trying to separate it. So that's one of the purposes I specifically talk about test flights where we'll learn. We want to get flying those as soon as we can because we know there's going to be learning that will likely change the design. And so for those first flights, if we actually recover an engine, that's just a bonus.

The real objective is obviously to get through that whole sequence and learn from it. Yeah, yeah. I guess you have one kind of like in-flight advantage compared to something like Falcon 9. When Falcon has to do a boost back burn, like it, it separates and like it's motor in. Like it's got to immediately turn around and get that engine to start. Like there's a very short window of time, whereas you're going to follow the arc. And so you can separate from Centaur and then you can you can stage it. You can let a little distance go between you, flip. Like, you know, you have a little bit more of a leisurely pace to before you have to get that heat shield in front of you. go through the rough part. Yeah, the timeline's a little more forgiving. Yeah. Speaking of Centaur, I have to ask, over under 0.5, people working on high ad on top of Centaur to bring one of those suckers back. What is the, where's the over under on that?

We got to bring back engines first. They're pretty applicable technologies, you know. I'm hearing more than zero. Yeah, taking the over. In terms of it's less mass, I will tell you that. So if you can bring engines back, you can bring Centaur back. As Suntar is in an even more higher energy state, right? It's orbital.

Like it's in January. So there can be some other hi-ad-related challenges to make sure we have a reasonably-sized high-at. But in terms of the basic volume and mass that you're bringing back, what we're doing here with the engine section is enveloping it or at least similar. Yeah, yeah. I would love a flight-proven centaur to be in a museum someday. So I encourage this endeavor.

We need a mock-up of the Martian Bring-Em-Em home graphic with just Centaur instead. We need that on our desk by next week, people. Yeah. That's cool. I'm excited for that. What else? What else here? Anthony, I'm looking on my list. Are we missing any much ones here? We've got a few minutes left here. I mean, we probably probably should at some point should ask about Dreamchaser and what's up? Yeah, probably. Probably. Flight two. You know, it's a dream chaser that, I don't know, are both things currently heading to the Cape, right? The Certification 2 booster is on a boat or did it get off a boat? I didn't check Twitter during. It's on the boat.

Both the booster and the upper stage is on the boat. They left a week ago Friday. And last I had Dream Chasers heading to the Cape for more testing and eventually some heat shield. Maybe it's at the Cape. Dream Chaser is at the Cape and it's been there for some time. So, yeah, they had some additional testing kind of certification type qualification testing they wanted to complete and then getting into mission processing. So they're moving forward and we talk to them every day. But we are, as I said, we've got our flight harbor will be down there soon.

We have an Atlas mission coming up next, off 41, and then everything, the center of attention will be Vulcan again and getting ready to fly in a September time frame, a CERT 2 mission. We have a burgeoning theory on this show about rocket production and the gaps between flights two. and three as being the important gap, not the gap between flight one and two. And I'm curious to how Vulcan shakes out in that regard, because it plays heavily into is Dreamchaser going to, you know, you made the boat to get down to the Cape, as Dreamchaser are going to miss the boat to go up to the ISS, so they're going to have to wait a mission or two, right? If you're, if you LA is ready to enroll in to get this thing off and certified for national

security flights, will the manifest get shuffled as a big question mark? But that also relies on, Flight 3 being pretty near term compared to Flight 2. So how does that future manifest shake out? Sure. So as you said, it is important for us to fly cert to and get certified. We have a backlog of over two dozen national security missions and really important missions for our country that we need to get moved forward with. From a hardware perspective, we're in really good shape. So the vehicles for flight three and four are in final assembly in our Decatur factory.

So we plan to ship those one day. one ship set next month in July and another ship set in August. So the manifest, you know, Flight 2, Flight 3, Flight 4 isn't going to be paced by hardware readiness. Vehicles are going to be down there. We have all the engines that we need from Blue Origin and Aerojet Rocketon for the upper stage. We have all the engines in the factory to support our near-term requirements. And so, as you said, getting through Flight 2, continuing to work with our... our national security space customer in the Space Force, together to go over not just the Flight 2 data,

but the bulk of everything that we've gone through the last several years to qualify Vulcan and then get through NSSL certification so we can get into flying national security missions soon thereafter. It's a fun step. So it's plausible that the manifest does shuffle because I think part of the thing that people miss with, you know, everyone's following is Gene Chaser Ready,

but the other part is like the ISS schedule is really hard to work with sometimes. You can, if you miss one week, you might wait for months just because there's crews going up and there's cargo going up and things can slip like long distances with the ISS purely from schedule management. You know, so you don't have to speak to Sierra Nevadas or Sierra Spaces schedule or whatever. But it sounds like hardware-wise, the ULA is comfortable if the manifest joggles around a little bit between those. Yeah, we are we're positioning ourselves with hardware with mission design. and everything because, I mean, we've been doing this for a long time. And it's nothing new that manifests are dynamic. As you said, I mean, we're launching really complex spacecraft and things like this. And then in the case of Dream Chaser or Starliner or whatever it is, it's going to Space Station, which is another

super complex system that just can't, you know, you just can't pull up to any day of the week and docked to. So we've always had volatility in our manifests and, you know, and had to have that. flexibility. And so, you know, we've been down this road before and we're ready to go through it. And we're just making sure we have hardware and all the other engineering products ready. So we can fly when our customers are ready and, you know, get up to an operational tempo on Vulcan. Payloads will be payloads, says the guy who worked on shuttle, Delta IV, Falcon. Seems like you've flown a couple of them before. Yeah.

Cool. Anthony, I know you wanted to ask another question about Dream Chaser. Do you want to squeeze that one in before the... What did I have written down? With the fairing? Oh, no fair. Oh, yes, yes. There's these renderings from back in the day of like bigger Dream Chaser that can carry crew

and not being under a fairing and having a weird payload adapter. Were all these just really cool drawings or like what would actually be the, if that was going to come to fruition, what would the process be to fly one of those bizarre looking payloads on top of Vulcan. So for the commercial crew program, if you go back, way back, Sierra Space was one of the competitors. It was actually S&C at the time with Dreamchacer, with a crude version of Dreamchacer.

And they had partnered with ULA as their launch vehicle provider. This is pre-Vulcan or Vulcan at its very early days. And so the launch vehicle was Atlas. And so they were going to fly unfair. And that all had to do with, in the events of anomalies, so they could safely separate, didn't want to have to be flying inside a payload faring and have to jettison that. And so, yeah, you're flying a winged vehicle on the front end of Centaur with a unique adapter. And we had gone down that path to do some initial integration of wind tunnel testing.

We were doing it in parallel for Starliner. You know, ultimately it was Starliner and Dragon, which were selected for the commercial crew program. And so those efforts didn't continue on. When Dreamchaser, they developed the cargo variant and were on ramp to the commercial cargo program. To make it a little more straightforward, they came up with the variant, the cargo variant, which one of its key differentiators is it has folding wings. And so it could fit within the faring, was flying without cruise, so it didn't have to have an ability for an emergency separation system during Ascent. And so flying with him, the faring was a little more straightforward way to go about it. Yeah.

I have some drawings of paperwork around, too. I built this once in Kerbal Space Program. It was an interesting experience. I made like a little spaceship thing, and I put it on top of a rocket, and I wanted to see if I could make the abort system work. And the problem I had is that so I would, like, separate it. And then immediately the lift from the vehicle would like, it would just like flip over. It was a bad news.

Like, you know, I killed a bunch of carpals. Just flipped right over. So the way I got around it, so you can send this back to the engineering team. This is a free tip, free tip for you guys. You put four engines underneath it as like your separation, like in like a square formation, right? And then you just tilt them all like five, ten degrees in like a spiral formation. So that when you separate, you start, you get rotational stability. Right.

Yeah, they will immediately pass out everyone in the crew because they're going like 120 RPM or whatever it is. But it will fly straight. This man worked on the shuttle program. Jake, where they had canton engines and all fax is thrott. The trajectory guys sit right outside here, so I'm going to go out right after this and

clone them into the hat. If they want to call me, I'm available to talk to you. We got your number. Yeah. He's about to hang up. Man. I mean, you know, put it out there, Jake.

I love it. I love it. This is your chance. So, yeah, if you got any openings in the trajectory department though. Jake can definitely I can get a new co-host, no problem. So I can be fine. If you got a minute here. We got a minute.

Yeah, you got a minute. So I was watching some of your recent guests and I saw a past guest Mr. Beck actually talking. You're talking to him about upper stages. And it seemed like he fat-shamed centaur calling it obese.

And that's That really got a lot of our folks pretty worked up. And so they wanted me, if I did nothing else in this, to communicate to you. Centaur 5 at least, you know, it's a little bit of a unique aspect ratio. It's a little bit stubby. But it's all muscle. It is a high-personing upper stage.

It's all muscle. And we just wanted Mr. Beck to be aware of that. Peter's on notice for sure. We'll send him a timestamp. Absolutely. Listen, if this is the forum for all of the rocket makers out there to come on and just talk some hot shit about each other, I'm here for it. In the most lo-fi, low stakes away possible, I'm here for it. Listen, I'm a Centaur fan, like, none other.

Centaur is, I still think, one of the greatest rockets of all time individually, regardless of what vehicle is flying on, whatever name, it's been around. It's got numbered now. centaurs is legit and it still doesn't make any sense how thin the tanks are that's a whole thing that I'll never actually believe on the internet so maybe when you bring one back we can cut one open and prove it we go through that process like regularity

they go I know centaur is thin but how thin is it and then we look it up in Wikipedia and I go no that can't be right there's too many zeros after this decimal point this can't be the correct width of the centaur skin we'll have to give you a tour of our factory indicator and you can see it with your own eyes We're going to let's do that, Jake.

Let's go prove it, you know? Yeah. Let's prove it. Well, we'll bring a dime and a human hair and a piece of tinfoil and we'll figure out if we can. And Peter Beck. We will go prove that centaur is very thin. I'm sure that will cause a day stir up.

It's a date. Yeah. Mark, this has been awesome. Thanks so much for hanging out with us and dealing with all this chaos. This has been really wonderful to chat. Thanks so much. Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity.

It's certainly a different, a little more relaxed forum than the one interviews I normally do. And so I greatly appreciate it. A lot of fun. Our whole goal, much like the people in the chat last week didn't understand. Our whole goal is to just mostly make me and Jake make each other laugh, also have fun. So this is why it's our mission statement of the show. So I enjoy it. What's happening in next week, Jake? We got, oh, a little, we got a pre-recorded one next week.

We do, yeah. So I'm traveling next week, but we didn't want to make. miss a week. So we've already recorded an interview. It is with Laura Delgado Lopez, who is, it's a bit of a different topic for us. It's going to be fun. We're talking about Latin American space agencies

and space industry, because she's doing a whole bunch of policy work on that and kind of the cool stuff that these different countries are doing and where they fit in the world of the literal planet Earth of different space endeavors. So it's going to be fun. That's a good show. So that'll post at our normal

time slot. So it's good. that's all we got all right thanks mark thanks everybody we'll see you later thank you bye