COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—United Launch Alliance (ULA) is preparing to shuffle its launch manifest in response to indefinitely delaying a Navy mission following a March 22 launch anomaly.
“I’m still pretty confident we’ll get the entire manifest off this year, but we’re going to have to shuffle around a bit,” ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno told Defense Daily Wednesday here at the 32nd Space Symposium.
While Bruno did not definitively commit to shuffling the company’s launch manifest, he said ULA is looking at “what-if” scenarios based on when the company could get the Navy’s Mobile User Objective System-5 (MUOS-5) satellite launched. He thought ULA would come to a definitive conclusion in the next few days on what caused the March 22 launch anomaly during a Orbital ATK [OA] Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) mission for NASA.
ULA, Bruno said, isolated the cause of the anomaly to the fuel system that feeds the fuel into the engine. ULA will formally eliminate other pieces of the “fault tree” in the next couple days. He declined to say what he thought the solution would be.
Bruno said the Atlas V first stage booster shut down about 5.5 seconds earlier than expected, forcing the Centaur upper stage to burn longer to compensate for that and still deliver Orbital ATK’s Cygnus spacecraft to the correct orbit. As a result of burning a bit of extra propellant, when Centaur deorbited, it went a little farther down range than ULA had planned.
“Very early on we, thought we knew which component…it [was] probably going to be, but I found over the years, it’s always a mistake to jump to that,” Bruno said.
Also impacting whether the launch manifest will be shuffled is if the Navy customer chooses to move forward and fuel the rocket with the stated risk involved from the anomaly investigation. Bruno said once the spacecraft is fueled, the “clock starts,” meaning launch has to take place. He said the Navy will make the decision whether to fuel the spacecraft “pretty soon.”
Bruno said ULA has not taken a financial hit due to the indefinite postponement of the MUOS-5 mission, saying there is no “significant financials” associated with the postponement. He called it a “normal part” of doing business.
“I think it’s interesting to people because we’re never late, ever, and other people in the industry are late on a not-so-infrequent basis,” Bruno said. “This is kind of normal stuff and we’ll recover from it.”
MUOS is a next-generation narrowband tactical satellite communications (SATCOM) system designed to significantly improve ground communications for forces on the move. ULA is a joint venture of Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Boeing [BA].