ULA has delayed the Vulcan rocket launch carrying 40 Amazon Leo satellites to Sunday at 12:11 p.m. EST due to a network communication issue between the ground and the rocket.
United Launch Alliance has delayed the launch of its Vulcan rocket carrying 40 Amazon Leo satellites to Sunday at 12:11 p.m. EST (1711 UTC). The delay follows a network communication issue between the ground and the rocket that could not be resolved in time for Saturday’s launch window.
The launch was originally scheduled for Friday, November 13, but was scrubbed after a power interruption at an Air Liquide gaseous nitrogen plant resulted in the loss of high-pressure pumps. ULA announced the delay at 8:41 a.m. EST, more than four hours before the originally scheduled Friday liftoff, after the launch team had begun loading liquid oxygen into the rocket’s Centaur 5 upper stage.
ULA then planned a Saturday attempt at 12:32:30 p.m. EST (1732:30 UTC) from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. That attempt was also delayed, pushing the launch to Sunday.
ULA said the rocket and the 40 Amazon Leo satellites it carries remain healthy.
"The launch of a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket carrying the Amazon [LV-01] mission is delayed due to a power interruption in the Air Liquide gaseous nitrogen plant which resulted in the loss of their high-pressure pumps," ULA said in a statement Friday morning. "Without confirmation of sustained commodity flow, the team has decided to realign the launch to the back-up opportunity."
The Vulcan will fly in the VC6L configuration, using six side-mounted solid rocket boosters built by Northrop Grumman and a 70-foot-long payload fairing. It will be the first Vulcan to fly with six boosters and the first to use a shorter version of its Centaur 5 upper stage built for low Earth orbit.
The rocket will carry more than 50,000 pounds of payload, which ULA says is a company record. The two Blue Origin-manufactured BE-4 engines will power the first stage, producing more than 1 million pounds of thrust.
The 40 satellites are the largest batch Amazon has launched at once. The mission is the first of 38 Vulcan launches Amazon has purchased.
"Vulcan will launch close to half our first-generation constellation, making it our primary workhorse over the next several years," Melissa Wuerl, Amazon Leo’s director of launch systems, said in a statement.
The launch will be the first flight of a redesigned booster nozzle. It comes as an investigation into the most recent failure, which occurred February 12 during a Space Force national security mission, is still open.
During the February 12 mission, dubbed USSF-87, one of the Vulcan’s four solid rocket boosters appeared to suffer a burn-through of its nozzle about 20 seconds after liftoff. Despite the malfunction, the mission’s payloads reached their planned orbit.
It was the second such failure in four Vulcan flights. In October 2024, a nozzle came off one of the boosters on Vulcan’s second certification launch. ULA later traced that problem to a manufacturing defect in an internal nozzle part.
The U.S. Space Force paused Vulcan’s use for national security missions after the February failure. ULA President and CEO Mark Peller said the Space Force wants ULA to get through this first commercial flight and review the data before making a decision.
"Every flight generates data and every flight teaches us something," Peller said in a statement released by the company. "And we’re going to look to this flight to get some more useful data in a flight environment on the effectiveness of the corrective action that we’ve implemented."
The mission marks Vulcan’s return to flight after a nine-month gap and is Amazon’s first Vulcan launch. Amazon has contracted 38 Vulcan launches to help build its Leo broadband constellation, which the FCC expects to have its first-generation constellation of 3,232 satellites in orbit by July 2029. A successful flight would give ULA a path back to regular launches while providing Amazon with heavy-lift capacity to expand its satellite network.
Sources
This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Company claims are reported as claims. Cover image is AI-generated.
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