United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket, equipped with the company’s Centaur V upper stage, lifted off on Monday for its inaugural certification mission from a space launch complex at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
One of the two payloads that launched as part of the Cert-1 mission is Astrobotic‘s Peregrine Mission One lunar lander, which is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. The other payload is Celestis‘ deep space Voyager mission called Enterprise Flight, ULA said Monday. (ULA is a Boeing–Lockheed Martin joint venture.)
Cert-1 is the first of two flights required in the U.S. Space Force’s certification process, with the second certification flight planned in the next few months.
“As we build on today’s successful launch, the team will continue to work towards our future bi-weekly launch rate to meet our customers’ manifest requirements, while continuing to develop future Vulcan upgrades including SMART reuse plans for downrange, non-propulsive recovery of Vulcan engines,” said Tory Bruno, president and CEO of ULA and a previous Wash100 Award recipient.
Of the more than 70 Vulcan launches sold by ULA, 38 missions are for Amazon’s Project Kuiper. ULA is set to launch the first mission under the second phase of the National Security Space Launch program this summer.
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