United Launch Alliance (ULA) CERT-2 mission targeting October 4

United Launch Alliance (ULA) has announced that the second Vulcan Rocket certification flight CERT-2 is targeting no earlier than October 4. The company has announced that this new test flight will take off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Cert 2 mission is the second of the two flights required for the Space Force certification process.

In January this year, ULA launched the first Vulcan rocket from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

ULA has designed this rocket to provide power and efficiency for customer missions. It is available in four standard configurations including zero, two, four, and six solid rocket boosters. It covers GEO, GTO, LEO, MEO, and TLI orbit classes.

United Launch Alliance (ULA) Cert-2 mission (Source – ULA)

It features a 17.6ft diameter payload fairing with a sandwich composite structure made of vented aluminum honeycomb core and graphite epoxy face sheets.

The rocket generates propulsion from a pair of BE-4 engines made by Blue Origin with a combined thrust of 550,000 lbs. It uses liquefied Natural Gas/Liquid Oxygen.

The Vulcan has six Northrop Grumman Graphite Epoxy Motor (GEM) 63XL Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs) with 459,600. Furthermore, the upper stage has two RL10C engines to generate 24,000 lbs nominal thrust.

The Cert 1 mission carried two payloads including Astrobotic’s first Peregrine Lunar Lander as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiatives. The second payload was Celestis Memorial Spaceflight’s deep space voyager mission.

The company estimated to fly Cert in the following months but it took more than 8 months to come up with a new launch date due to new preparation.

(source)