Space Force pauses national security launches on Vulcan – Breaking Defense
https://breakingdefense.com/2026/02/space-force-pauses-national-security-launches-on-vulcan/
Space Force pauses national security launches on Vulcan – Breaking Defense
https://breakingdefense.com/2026/02/space-force-pauses-national-security-launches-on-vulcan/
4 Comments
…. until the SRB investigation is resolved
> “This is going to be a many-months process as we work through the exact technical issue that happened and the corrective actions we need to make sure, we need to take to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Oof. The first time they saw the SRB nozzle anomaly on Cert-2, Vulcan stopped flying for 10 months. Sounds like this grounding will be just as long if not longer.
Gonna be a pretty sparse rest of the year for ULA with Atlas V launches only. Don’t know when the cargo-only Starliner-1 will fly since they are still trying to determine the root cause of all the problems they found (doesn’t sound like Starliner will make the previously-announced April launch window). At least Amazon will get some more of their Atlas V Kuiper launches off the ground.
hard to understand how ULA arent at the risk of bankruptcy at this point even with a $10bn backlog.
Not surprising. One nozzle failing can be a one-off manufacturing error, but two nozzles in four flights is a systematic issue. ULA was lucky that neither nozzle hit the engines of the core stage.