United Launch Alliance will return its Vulcan rocket to service on November 13, nine months after a solid rocket booster anomaly threw the company's 2026 launch schedule into disarray. ULA announced the date on Wednesday; it remains pending range approval.
The mission will launch 40 satellites for Amazon Leo, the company's broadband constellation. It is the first of 38 Vulcan flights Amazon has booked to deploy the bulk of its network, lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Much rides on it for ULA. The rocket suffered nozzle failures on its solid rocket boosters on two of its first four missions, most recently in February. In both cases the rocket overcame the failure and completed its mission — but officials at the US Space Force, ULA's primary customer, lost confidence. The service certified Vulcan for national security launches in 2025 and flew two such missions before the February incident grounded the rocket.
The root cause is still not public. ULA and booster manufacturer Northrop Grumman have not identified what went wrong in February; investigators blamed the first occurrence in 2024 on a manufacturing defect in an insulator meant to protect the nozzle's metallic structure from superheated exhaust. ULA says only that engineers "made great strides" in understanding the anomaly, identified several potential contributors and mitigated them through design and process improvements to the nozzle. The upcoming flight uses the improved nozzle — and doubles as the test that generates flight data to validate it.
The launch is also a technical first: Vulcan will fly with a full complement of six solid rocket boosters for the first time. It debuts an extended payload fairing to fit Amazon's satellite stack and a shortened Centaur upper stage optimized for low-Earth-orbit missions, bringing the rocket's total height to 221 feet (67.4 metres).
Why it matters. The Pentagon has entrusted ULA with roughly half of its major launches through the early 2030s, so delays are a capacity problem, not a public-relations one. The Space Force has already moved six missions off Vulcan to SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, and ULA received six future missions originally assigned to SpaceX in return — among them GPS satellites, an Air Force Research Laboratory lunar mission and a large missile-warning satellite. The trades have not changed how many missions each company holds, but they have changed when things fly.
Brig. Gen. Eric Zarybnisky, the chief rocket buyer at Space Systems Command, wants data from commercial flights before clearing Vulcan to resume national security launches. At least two Amazon Leo missions sit on the schedule before the next such mission, perhaps early next year. "Those flights will have a significant number of solids," he said; the clearance will depend heavily on what the service sees — not only from ground tests, but from flight data.
One caveat: a launch date is not a clearance. November 13 depends on the range, and whether the nozzle change actually fixes the problem can only be judged after the flight — as a data point, not a proof.
