CEO Tory Bruno said United Launch Alliance is designing its Vulcan rocket to go above and beyond the capabilities the government requested to make sure it can be useful in the future. | Win McNamee/Getty Images Lockheed-Boeing space launch venture seeks to maintain edge

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — United Launch Alliance is building its new rocket to support military leaders who say that space will soon become a warfighting domain, the company’s CEO told POLITICO.

Tory Bruno, who has led the launch company since 2014, said ULA is designing its Vulcan rocket to go above and beyond the capabilities the government requested to make sure it can be useful in the future contested space environment described by military leaders like Gens. John Raymond and John Hyten, who lead Air Force Space Command and U.S. Strategic Command, respectively.


“They talk about space moving from an uncontested environment to one that is contested, and now they are even using language around it becoming a warfighting domain like air, land and sea,” Bruno told POLITICO during the Space Symposium earlier this month. “So one of the places we feel we can contribute to that and do right by the country is, as long as we’re designing a new rocket, we’re going to give it more capability.”

Bruno said the rocket will be able to fly to more orbits than the government wanted, and will be able to carry more mass to those orbits — “in some cases, a lot more mass, because we anticipate in future years as the threat evolves and the country’s architecture to deal with that becomes finalized, that the requirements will change.”

Despite having this additional capability, Bruno said, the rocket will still be able to meet the price goal of under $100 million per launch set by Hyten, though he declined to get into specifics amid the ongoing competition for the Air Force’s launch services agreement contract.

“Vulcan will be able to make that goal,” he said. “Now that we’re getting close to the end, we’re being very careful from a competitive point of view about saying too much about our pricing, so that’s why I’m being a little vague with you.”

Bruno also talked about what modifications the company is making to accommodate its new Vulcan rocket, how the purchase of Russian-made RD-180 rocket engines has been insulated from broader discord with Russia and why he chooses to manage his own Twitter profile.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

The relationship between the U.S. and Russia is at a particularly contentious point. Is that having any impact on your purchase of the RD-180 rocket engines?

Technically, we don’t have a business relationship with Russia. We buy the engines from a company called RD Amross, which is UTC and [Energomash]; it’s a joint venture structure.

Having said that, we all know that the manufacturer is Energomash, that’s where they’re coming from. We have seen no change in their behavior at all. We’re currently buying engines from them. We’re getting regular deliveries about once a quarter and they’ve all been on time, and there’s been really no change in their behavior relative to us, or as far as we know, to RD Amross.

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There are other [certifications] that come with the engine, pedigree packages and testing and things like that, all of that is of the same quality, they haven’t shorted us anything. So we’ve actually, at the working level, seen no change whatsoever, and we have another delivery coming soon. We’re in communication with them and they tell us it is on track, and we’re getting all the paperwork we would normally get.

ULA hosted a supplier fly-in day on Capitol Hill last month.

What we like to do once a year is we bring all of our major suppliers together. I think this was around 60 companies. And we brief them on where our business is and what’s important to us from our supplier partners, and what is going on in the industry as well as the Hill. Then, while they’re all there, we invite them to go see their representatives and check in and let them know that they’re part of the program and what that program means to their company.

It’s like a State of the Union. We do it every year, we fly them all in and either I or one of our other senior executives will give them an update on what’s going on here, give a status update on Vulcan and Atlas and Delta and so on.

What are the new themes you have heard this year?

Vulcan, of course, is a year further along, so we were able to tell them about our factory changes and modifications that are really all in place, let them know what’s happening with the pad, which is being modified in between Atlas flights to accommodate both [Atlas and Vulcan rockets]. That was a central theme, because everyone is curious what’s happening with the new rocket. And really, nearly all of them are significant participants on the new rocket, so they all care.

In terms of the acquisition environment, the big activity for us is the Launch Services Agreement with the Air Force, or LSA, which was a solicitation a few months back. We have a proposal in, we are in the evaluation notice phase ... where they send us written questions [about our proposal].

We are told they would be in a position in a month or so to start fact-finding, which is a whole other phase where they really want to understand the cost. This first set of [evaluation notices] was really more about the content or scope or terms of the proposal. That will go on for quite some time, they have an evaluation criteria that they perform and then they will make contract awards. They’re going to make more than one. They could make three, they could make four, but they can’t make more than four because as we understand it there were four offers.

At the end of the summer, they would make their awards. Those participants would continue development of their rockets. That would go for another year, and then there would be rockets at some state of maturity, and the government would be able to down-select again. Their intent is to down-select to two providers who would then finish development and then be there for another competitive phase, where they actually acquire a block of missions from each one.

That’s the whole thing. Obviously, long way of answering your question, that was a topic we went through with our supply chain. They have a lot of interest in what’s going on there, so we walked through all of that process with them and discussed with them the content of our bid and what the design of the rocket would look like and got them up to speed on what’s going on and that we were confident we would be selected.

But can you give an update on the Vulcan program, potentially selecting an engine for it?

I can say that I will do that soon.

Fair enough. Any broader update of the Vulcan program?

It’s been a pretty busy year for us. We have completed the factory modifications so we can build Vulcan at Decatur, [Ala.]. That includes a number of capital investments around things like automated welding machines and other types of equipment.

That’s exciting thing for our factory team, because there are still a lot of manual operations on almost any aerospace product you will see. You would be surprised, I think, in almost any aerospace factory, how much touch labor there is and how much craftsmanship, and that’s true on our rockets as well today. But there were a number of opportunities for us to bring in modern manufacturing automations to both lower the cost, shorten cycle time and improve the quality.

An example of that would be the welds. There’s a lot of welding on a rocket and the Centaur that we fly today, the propellant tanks have 180,000 welds. Some of those are entirely by hand, others are machine welds but controlled by hand. So by automating the process like that, you save a lot of money, you save a lot of time and the welds are much more consistent.

The other thing that’s happening is the pad modifications. We intend to fly Vulcan and Atlas off the same launch pad and they’re going to overlap for a number of years, so we needed to have a launch pad that could go back and forth, because the rockets are different sizes. The diameters are significantly different and Vulcan is also a little bit longer, so we are modifying our launch tower and launch pad so platforms can go up and down, because normally they’re fixed. You design your rocket and then you build a pad to fit your rocket, that's how it’s always been done.

[The vertical integration facility] is where all these platforms are, and there’s holes in them so you can walk around them and do your work. So those are all being made to be backwards compatible, so you can fly a Vulcan, then you can fly an Atlas and go back and forth. So that’s kind of a neat engineering problem for our teams, because I’m not sure I can point to an integration facility that is designed to go back and forth between different-sized rockets, so it’s kind of a unique thing to do.

Why did you decide to modify the pad versus getting a second pad for the rocket?

The pad is capable of flying both, and obviously, that saves a bunch of money. The vertical integration facility, it was cheaper to modify that to go backwards compatibility, like I just described, than to build a new one.

The one place we said we’re going to have to build something new was the piece of equipment we call the mobile launch platform. It’s this giant table on railroad wheels, and this thing starts inside that vertical integration facility, we build the rocket up on that thing, then that thing — which weighs a million pounds by itself, now it’s got a million-pound rocket on it — rolls out and down to the actual launch pad, where there’s a big flame trench. In this case, now, there’s also a crew access tower, because this is where we’ll launch people on Boeing’s Starliner from.

The mobile launch platform, we decided we needed a second one, a dedicated one for Vulcan, so we’re in the process today of designing that and then we’ll start building it probably at the end of the year. Then they’ll each have their own mobile platform, but they’ll share the integration building, the actual launch pad and the crew access tower.

Gen. John Hyten, the head of U.S. Strategic Command, has said DoD needs to get launch prices down to $100 million a launch. Is that a goal you can reach?

Yes.

How are you going to do that?

Vulcan will be able to make that goal. Now that we’re getting close to the end, we’re being very careful from a competitive point of view about saying too much about our pricing, so that’s why I’m being a little vague with you. But yes, the general spoke to us quite some time ago so we would understand the needs of the Air Force. We understand them, and we’re designing the rocket to be able to do that.

We’ve also designed it to do some other things. In that [request for proposals], they tell us we want to fly a set of specific orbits. ... Those are our requirements, please design us a rocket that will do that. And we have, but as we look at that as well as the other things you hear Gen. [John] Raymond [commander of Air Force Space Command] and Gen. Hyten talking about, they talk about space moving from an uncontested environment to one that is contested, and now they are even using language around it becoming a warfighting domain like air, land and sea.

So one of the places we feel we can contribute to that and do right by the country is as long as we’re designing a new rocket, we’re going to give it more capability. So there’s a set of reference orbits, we can fly more orbits than that. Each one of those reference orbits has a certain minimum mass they want lifted to it, we’re going to provide more mass. In some cases, a lot more mass, because we anticipate in future years as the threat evolves and the country’s architecture to deal with that becomes finalized, that the requirements will change.

The best way for us to give our customer flexibility is to have a more capable rocket.

I’ve heard that you manage your own Twitter account. Why do you do it yourself?

It would be so easy to outsource, [but] I thought it was important for the space industry itself, not just space but the industry, to be more accessible to people because space touches all of our lives every single day. One of the ways to do that is to put a face and a personality and an accessibility to the leader of the company’s presence on social media.

So it’s my personal goal — and I make time for it. If you’re wondering my routine, I try and integrate it with my email routine. So when I’m doing email and I get through the most important emails, then I will shift over to social media and I’ll do some of that, come back and finish some more emails. So you have to manage it and plan time for it, or it would never, ever happen.

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