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ULA's Vulcan rocket is set to return to flight on Friday the 13th
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United Launch Alliance plans to return its Vulcan rocket to flight on Nov. 13, a Friday, nine months after a solid rocket booster anomaly disrupted its 2026 schedule. The mission will lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, pending range approval. It will carry 40 satellites for Amazon's Leo broadband constellation.
The flight is the first of 38 Vulcan missions Amazon has booked to deploy the bulk of its network. ULA's flagship rocket has flown four times, but nozzle failures on solid boosters affected two of those missions, most recently in February. In both cases the rocket completed its mission, yet the anomalies shook confidence at the U.S. Space Force.
Space Force officials will closely scrutinize the return-to-flight mission. The Pentagon has assigned Vulcan roughly half of its major launches through the early 2030s. The Space Force certified Vulcan for national security launches in 2025 and flew two missions before grounding it after February's booster incident.
ULA said engineers have made great strides in understanding the February anomaly. They identified several potential contributors and mitigated them through design and process improvements to the nozzle. The upcoming launch will use the improved nozzle design, while additional testing and analysis continue in parallel.
By flying the improved design, ULA gains valuable flight data to validate the changes. The company called this the most beneficial path for supporting all its customers. The mission also matters for Amazon, which needs reliable launch capacity to build its Leo constellation.
The launch date remains pending range approval, ULA said. A successful flight would ease concerns about Vulcan's reliability and help restore the launch cadence ULA needs. A setback, by contrast, could further delay national security and commercial missions.
