ULA’s Bruno Denies Igniter Problems with Vulcan Centaur’s BE-4 Engine
In a recent report, the GAO — Government Accountability Office — had reported technical issues with the Blue Origin produced BE-4 engine that will power United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan Centaur rocket.
Vulcan Centaur’s first flight will launch Astrobotic Technology’s Peregrine on a mission to land on the moon. That flight was scheduled for the end of 2021, but it has slipped into next year due to COVID-19 pandemic related delays with Peregrine.
23 responses to “ULA’s Bruno Denies Igniter Problems with Vulcan Centaur’s BE-4 Engine”
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“We will fly when our payload is ready.” means not a lot to the subject at hand if the payload can fly on another rocket.
Said payload can fly on another rocket, but not likely for as rock-bottom a price as ULA is doubtless offering in exchange for the risk of being on the maiden flight of Vulcan.
So long as Peregrine is late, for whatever reason, ULA doesn’t have to admit to any problems so long as all such are solved by the time Peregrine is ready to fly.
If it can. At bare minimum, they’ll still have to do the analysis work. And as Duheagle points out, they likely won’t get a better deal. And then there’ll be further delays trying to fit into someone else’ schedule and with integration, unless they can pull off what Northrup Grumman and Space Safari’s Tactically Responsive Launch did just two weeks ago with rapid response payload, integration and launch in less than a year.
What I would be more interested in is why ULA won’t proceed ahead with launching Vulcan with a dummy payload, if they really are ready to go.
I would say your motive choices anent ULA not doing a dummy launch are two:
1) Vulcan is not really ready to go – which that podcast you have subsequently linked to pretty much confirms.
2) Doing a dummy launch first would delay one or both of the two revenue launches currently on the Vulcan manifest even more than they’re already being delayed.
Note that these are not mutually exclusive. The first seems definitely to be true, but the second could be true as well.
If the second is also true, then even the far-from-retail launch prices granted to Astrobotic and Sierra Space would help if they can be obtained in full ASAP in order to at least partly defray the extra cost of having to launch the first NSSL Phase 2 mission on an Atlas V instead of on Vulcan.
I think Tory Bruno pretty well gave us a good explanation.
1.) The payloads are not on time. Both of the customers have confirmed that much.
2.) The BE-4 igniter issue and the other is not one and Tory is scratching his head at where the GAO got the info. Perhaps the work of a disgruntled Blue Origin worker? It would not be the first time they got something wrong.
3.) He says that things are on track still to support a December launch of Vulcan.
So, there has to be more behind switching payloads now. Perhaps ULA just isn’t responsive enough? At least not right now with Vulcan.
In an interview with AW&ST, published June 24, Bruno says Vulcan will not fly in 2021. I listened to this a couple of days ago and didn’t make note of just where that remark occurs. Sorry.
You misunderstand I was referencing the podcast were we know that the Vulcan and BE-4 work remains on track for supporting a launch in that time frame. The Peregrine delays force them to launch in 2022.
“And Irene, I will break news for you because it’s you. So you’ve heard us talking about flying this year. And the fact is we have a path to go fly at the end of the year if Blue Origin is able to hold their schedules going forward and nothing exciting happens. And I put all these caveats because development is development and you’re not done until you’re done. We would be able to fly before the end of the year, likely in December. However, I will share with you that Peregrine is also a development program, and it is their very first spacecraft.”
So here he says that the BE-4 and Vulcan work in general would allow launch in December of this year. The following paragraph is where he states that Peregrine is delayed so it won’t. This is why Bruno keeps saying that they will be ready when the customer is.
Fair point. I guess the context sort of evaporated from my head over the couple of days since I had listened to that and all that stuck was “not this year.”
By the way, Bruno says the flight engines arrive “soon”:
https://twitter.com/torybru…
Yes, that is a vacuous statement.
I’m inclined to agree with Tory Bruno on this one. Given that the BE-4s on Vulcan only have to light once – on the pad – it’s hard to see how igniters could be a delay factor.
For New Glenn, however, igniter issues are certainly possible considering that its flight profile includes multiple re-lights in space and during high-speed passage through atmosphere. Perhaps the GAO simply mistook NG-related BE-4 issues as applicable to Vulcan as well.
Some liquid engines lack flame holders, and need constant re-ignition or they’ll blow themselves out. I don’t know the specifics for the BE-4 but ignition issues might very well effect Vulcan as well. At least in theory.
I suppose anything is possible. But BE-4 has been run many times on test stands so the idea of a light-once-and-go version of BE-4 having igniter issues just seems farfetched. Other issues, I’m perfectly prepared to believe.
Without knowing what the exact details were, we’re just guessing. And yes, we’ve seen the BE-4s being fired for minutes at a time, even at full thrust. So whatever the problem was, it’s not one that effects the engine’s ability to stay running.
For all that we know, this could’ve been something like, say, a manufacturing issue with the igniters that caused problems. Kind of like the COPV problem that plagued SpaceX for several years.
The COPV issue for CRS-7 is the most applicable one here, I think. Mainly because that involved the failure of a strut that then allowed the bottle to break free and release all of its helium gas and cause the propellant tank to overpressurize and rupture. The strut was defective and had to be redesigned and the inspection criteria changed to prevent another such event from happening again.
The strut failed because a metal supplier was providing faulty product which failed at ~50% of spec.
About 2 years later the Kobe Steel scandal broke; faulty alloys had been sold for decades, but no confirmation SpaceX was a victim.
I seem to recall that some of the struts tested failed less than 20% of spec. A 4 factor of safety is inadequate when things are 1/5 of design strength.
The NASA and SpaceX IRT reports say otherwise as summed up from NASA Spaceflight:
It stated, “the key technical finding by the IRT with regard to this failure was that it was due to a design error: SpaceX chose to use an industrial grade (as opposed to aerospace grade) 17-4 PH SS (precipitation-hardening stainless steel) cast part in a critical load path under cryogenic conditions and strenuous flight environments.”
It went on to add, “the implementation was done without adequate screening or testing of the industrial grade part, without regard to the manufacturer’s recommendations for a 4:1 factor of safety when using their industrial grade part in an application, and without proper modeling or adequate load testing of the part under predicted flight conditions. This design error is directly related to the Falcon 9 CRS-7 launch failure as a ‘credible’ cause.”
In simpler terms, the steel strut that SpaceX chose was not certified to be used in such conditions. Furthermore, SpaceX did not meet the 4:1 redundancy requirement that the manufacturer had instructed.
Therefore, the IRT recommended that SpaceX applied greater care when certifying commercially sourced parts for flight.
Also:
“Lastly, the key technical finding by the IRT with regard to this failure was that it was due to a design error: SpaceX chose to use an industrial grade (as opposed to aerospace grade) 17-4 PH SS (precipitation-hardening stainless steel) cast part (the “rod end”) in a critical load path under cryogenic conditions and strenuous flight environments,”
Whether the Kobe Steel scandal contributed to that, we may never know for certain unless someone wants to fund a major deep sea salvage operation to try to find and recover the strut. But does seem that SpaceX still shares in the blame.
So GAO reports BE4 igniter issues (probably electric, like Raptor) and a booster performance problem. We also got news that the RL10C-1-1 for Vulcan’s Centaur 5 is being twitchy during Atlas 5 launches and may not fly again until 2022 – the carbon nozzle extension is “ringing” (vibrating). Lovely ?
Poor ULA. No matter what it does, it always seems to get snakebitten by engines.
Because they buy them from sharks either way. Roll your own and you can’t blame anyone else.
Tory Bruno explains it all in very good detail in this interview:
https://aviationweek.com/de…
And now 8 months later we know that even if Peregrine had been ready to go, it would not have had a ride to go with as ULA still hasn’t taken delivery of the engines. By December it was maybe be ready in April. In 2 weeks we’ll be in April and now we are talking about maybe Vulcan will launch by the end of the year… Still seems like the pessimists have been right.