A little more than a week after its most recent Atlas 5 rocket launch, United Launch Alliance rolled a Vulcan booster to the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Wednesday morning to begin stacking its first post-certification Vulcan rocket.
The operation, referred to by ULA as Launch Vehicle on Stand (LVOS), is the first major milestone towards the launch of the third Vulcan rocket to date. ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno announced the move Wednesday morning on social media.
This is the second time that this particular Vulcan booster was brought to Space Launch Complex 41 in anticipation of a launch campaign. It was previously readied in late October in support of the USSF-106 mission, the planned, first national security flight of a Vulcan rocket.
However, plans changed as the process of certifying Vulcan to fly these government payloads took longer than expected.
Busy day at the Cape… pic.twitter.com/CLnY7wNEw8
— Tory Bruno (@torybruno) July 2, 2025
During the second of two certification flights for Vulcan, an issue with an insulator component on one of the Northrop Grumman-built GEM 63XL solid rocket motors caused a burn through less than a minute into the early October launch. The rocket was able to compensate for the anomaly, but it resulted in several more months of investigative work before the U.S. Space Force was able to close out its certification work.
In February, as the certification process continued, ULA made the decision to pivot from holding operations on the pad for Vulcan and USSF-106 to instead allow another important customer, Amazon, to proceed with launching its first batch of Project Kuiper satellites for its low Earth orbit internet constellation.
“We stay integrated with the spacecraft teams and we were monitoring where [Amazon’s Project] Kuiper was and where the SF-106 partner was and so we made the decision that we had a little time there,” said Gary Wentz, the vice president of Government and Commercial Programs, during an interview with Spaceflight Now in early February.
“We knew we had some out-of-position work that we needed to do on the SF-106 booster. We had to replace some components and then subsequently we would retest those,” Wentz said. “And so, we elected to go ahead and LVOS that booster to get that work off the critical path so that we’re prepared to launch, whether it was 106 or Kuiper.”
Near the end of March, the U.S. Space Force’s Assured Access to Space (AATS) office confirmed that Vulcan achieved its certifications to begin launching missions that are part of its National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program. It has a backlog of 25 such missions as part of the NSSL Phase 2 contract awarded over the course of five years and another two missions assigned during order year one for NSSL Phase 3 Lane 2.
Prior to returning to Vulcan launch preparations, ULA launched a pair of Atlas 5 rockets with Kuiper satellites onboard on April 28 and June 23.
During a media roundtable on the sidelines of the 40th Space Symposium in early April, Bruno said they planned to launch around 11 to 13 times by the end of the year. He said that would be a roughly 50-50 split between Atlas and Vulcan rockets.
The next two Vulcan launches are planned to be two NSSL Phase 2 missions: USSF-106 and USSF-87. The Vulcan rockets for both have been at the Cape since last year, but the status of the payloads hasn’t been publicly discussed given their ties to national security.
Bruno said following those two NSSL missions, ULA will launch the first Kuiper Vulcan mission and then bounce back and forth between Atlas and Vulcan flights through the end of the year.
National security Vulcan missions
The USSF-106 mission will carry multiple payloads, but to date, the only one that has been publicly identified is the Department of the Air Force’s Navigation Technology Satellite-3 (NTS-3). The prime contractor is L3Harris Technologies, which integrated an agile positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) payload onto an ESPAStar satellite bus from Northrop Grumman.
The mission is designed and coordinated by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). It follows in the footsteps of the Navy Research Laboratory’s NTS-1 and NTS-2 satellites that were precursors to the Global Positioning System (GPS) constellation that began deploying in the 1970s.
“This Vanguard not only aims to support GPS users through vital development of new technologies and techniques, but also to show how an agile and responsive U.S. satellite navigation architecture is paramount to defeating the most challenging threats to warfighter success, both today and through the coming decades,” said Arlen Biersgreen, the NTS-3 program manager in a 2023 statement.
During the 2022 Space Symposium, Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle, commander of AFRL, told reporters that the NTS-3 would perform “over 100 experiments” designed to help “solve warfighters’ problems in the contested environment.”
“We know that the way of warfare has changed and we’re going to be having difficulties with, you know, jamming and have difficulties getting our position, navigation and timing signals to our warfighter,” Pringle said, as reported by Fedscoop.com. “So, the way that we can look at new ways of addressing that on this satellite is really exciting for us whether it’s spot beaming or timing and navigation and all the antennas.”
The AFRL said the spacecraft is designed to operate for one year in a near-geosynchronous orbit and “will be the center point for multiple experiments across multiple technical areas. This is notable since the current fleet of GPS satellites operate in a medium Earth orbit (MEO).
The satellite will carry multiple atomic clocks for precise timekeeping as well as Chips-Message Robust Authentication (Chimera), “which is designed to jointly authenticate satellite orbit data and measurements of the range between the satellite and user, to provide an extremely robust protection against GPS spoofing for civil users,” according to the AFRL.
After USSF-106 launches, ULA will then launch a pair of Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) satellites as part of the USSF-87 mission.
