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ULA plans Vulcan upgrade to compete with SpaceX Starship

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Vulcan Heavy among options for LEO market competitiveness

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ULA has Amazon ( AMZN ) missions booked for Vulcan rocket

By Joey Roulette

ORLANDO, Dec 14 (Reuters) - Boeing ( BA ) and Lockheed Martin's ( LMT )

joint rocket venture, United Launch Alliance (ULA), plans to

upgrade a version of its Vulcan rocket to challenge SpaceX's

Starship in the low Earth orbit satellite launch market, the

company's CEO said.

ULA wants to develop a Vulcan model tailored to the

increasingly lucrative low Earth orbit (LEO) market, mainly due

to SpaceX launching thousands of satellites there for its

Starlink Internet service.

"We have recently completed a big trade study for what we

want to have to be competitive in a future LEO market," ULA's

CEO Tory Bruno told Reuters on Thursday on the sidelines of a

military space conference in Orlando.

"And we've selected a modification to Vulcan which gives us

significantly more mass to LEO and puts us in a competitive

range."

ULA's Vulcan rocket, powered by engines from Jeff Bezos'

Blue Origin, made its first two launches this year and is

designed primarily to meet the demands of Pentagon missions into

various orbits.

Among the options ULA drew up for an LEO-optimized version,

Bruno said, were a "Vulcan Heavy," or three Vulcan core boosters

strapped together. He also said there were "other Vulcan

configurations that are pretty unique, that have propulsion in

unusual places".

Though SpaceX's Starship is primarily designed for crewed

missions to the moon and Mars, the company plans to use it to

accelerate its deployment of huge batches of Starlink satellites

into low Earth orbit.

That has put pressure on SpaceX's rivals to match Starship's

capabilities as other firms like Amazon ( AMZN ) scramble to build

competing satellite networks, driving demand for big launchers.

ULA expects to finish development of the variant by the time

he believes Musk's Starship - a gigantic rocket that is

eventually meant to go to Mars - begins offering LEO satellite

launches, Bruno said, which he suggests could be several years

from now.

"We're not going to be facing him in that particular

marketplace for a while," Bruno predicted.

Musk has said he wants to roughly double the power of

Starship and refine the rocket's ability to quickly return to

land in giant mechanical arms, indicating SpaceX is anywhere

between several months to over a year from flying LEO Starlink

satellites.

ULA has several Vulcan missions booked with Amazon ( AMZN ) to deploy

its Kuiper internet satellites into space, making the rocket an

important part of Amazon's ( AMZN ) strategy to challenge Starlink.

Amazon ( AMZN ) has also booked launches with other rockets as part of a

record 2022 multi-launch agreement.

SpaceX has launched six Starship test flights to space from

its Starbase rocket campus in south Texas, displaying its

dramatic test-to-failure ethos involving successive upgrades and

incremental testing milestones before locking in a

commercial-grade design. Other companies, including ULA, will

not launch a new rocket until its design is finalized.

ULA is aiming to fly eight Vulcan missions next year and 12

missions with Atlas V, Vulcan's retiring predecessor.

Vulcan starts at a launch price of roughly $110 million -

slightly over the base price of a SpaceX Falcon 9 - and has a

book order of roughly 70 missions including its Amazon ( AMZN ) missions,

adding urgency to get the rocket flying routinely.

ULA, formed in a 2006 merger of Boeing ( BA ) and Lockheed's space

launch programs, has been up for sale for over a year, drawing

interest from Sierra Nevada Corp's space unit Sierra Space and

Bezos' Blue Origin, Reuters has previously reported.

Bruno has declined to comment on acquisition talks.