This morning, at the crack of dawn ULA launched the second flight of their Vulcan rocket, aiming to certify it to carry national security payloads so they ca...
Here’s the requisite Manley analysis of the GEM 63XL SRB anomaly on today’s Vulcan certification flight.
Given that Vulcan has only two BE-4s, I don’t expect they would have much capability for engine-out unless it occurred very shortly before scheduled MECO. As for SRB-out capability, that feels like it would depend on the required orbit, SRB configuration, and the exact nature of the failure. They’ve now demonstrated a certain level of SRB-out capability for the VC2S configuration, but I think a certain amount of luck was involved, in that the rest of the rocket seemingly sustained minimal damage. For the 4- and 6-SRB variants, I think the chances of cascading failures would be higher.
I wonder how much “engine out” capacity they would have on a normal flight. This is a pretty big architectural difference vs Falcon and Starship.
Given that Vulcan has only two BE-4s, I don’t expect they would have much capability for engine-out unless it occurred very shortly before scheduled MECO. As for SRB-out capability, that feels like it would depend on the required orbit, SRB configuration, and the exact nature of the failure. They’ve now demonstrated a certain level of SRB-out capability for the VC2S configuration, but I think a certain amount of luck was involved, in that the rest of the rocket seemingly sustained minimal damage. For the 4- and 6-SRB variants, I think the chances of cascading failures would be higher.