Space Force weighs launch alternatives as Vulcan faces potential months-long grounding
The United Launch Alliance (ULA) has a solid rocket booster problem, and it keeps not solving it.
The Space Force announced on Feb. 25 that it was pausing all Vulcan national security missions pending an investigation into a Feb. 12 performance anomaly during the USSF-87 mission — the second failure of the same hardware in under two years. As SpaceNews reported, observers noted an irregular plume pattern from one of the four GEM 63XL solid rocket boosters built by Northrop Grumman. Closeup video from the launch showed a fiery plume near the throat of the booster, consistent with a burn-through at the nozzle — the same failure mode suspected in a 2024 anomaly on the same booster variant.
That 2024 failure occurred on Oct. 4 during the Cert-2 test flight, when investigators determined a carbon composite insulator inside the nozzle failed to protect the metallic structure, Ars Technica reported. ULA CEO Tory Bruno said at the time the company had "isolated the root cause and made appropriate corrective actions." The Feb. 12 anomaly is a recurrence of the same problem type, approximately 16 months apart.
Col. Eric Zarybnisky, portfolio acquisition executive for space access at Space Systems Command, ordered all Vulcan National Security Space Launch (NSSL) missions paused on Feb. 25, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine. The Congressional response has been blunt: House Armed Services Committee chairman Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R., Tenn.) indicated the program would face at least a six-month delay, SpaceNews noted.
The timing is poor. Vulcan had seven national security payloads scheduled for 2026, and ULA leadership had told reporters earlier this month the company was turning a corner, targeting 18 to 22 Vulcan launches this year. The actual 2025 record was six total launches — one on Vulcan — against a plan of 20. The backlog is real: ULA holds more than $8 billion in military launch contracts, Ars Technica reported, and the NSSL queue does not pause while the investigation runs.
Space Systems Command confirmed on March 21 that GPS III SV10, the next satellite in the operational GPS constellation, will now launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in late April — another national security payload diverted from ULA's manifest to its primary competitor. SpaceX has now won multiple contracts that ULA expected to fly on Vulcan.
The leadership situation compounds the problem. Tory Bruno, ULA's CEO who oversaw Vulcan from development through its certification, announced in January that he was leaving the firm to pursue another opportunity. His departure came as the program entered what was supposed to be its proving-ground year.
ULA says it has identified the failure mode and is working with Northrop Grumman on a fix. The Space Force says it is weighing alternatives. Both statements are simultaneously true and insufficient. A booster that burns through its own nozzle does not have a process problem — it has a thermal management problem inside a structure that needs to survive combustion. That is a harder engineering fix than a quality control audit.
The question for the Space Force is not whether alternatives exist — Falcon 9 is commercially available and certified for NSSL missions. The question for ULA is whether it can fix the hardware fast enough to matter. The investigation, the Congressional pressure, and the payload reroutes are all moving on separate tracks. The 18-22 launch target for 2026 is not surviving this.