United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket and 40 Amazon Leo broadband satellites fell back to Earth minutes after liftoff Sunday, a crushing setback that will ripple across all sectors of the US space industry.
The Vulcan rocket is on contract to launch roughly half of the US military's satellites in the next few years, and Sunday's mission was the first of 38 Vulcan launches booked by Amazon to build out its network of broadband Internet satellites aimed at competing with SpaceX's Starlink. Sunday's failure is expected to ground the rocket for an indefinite period of time.
Vulcan is no stranger to close calls, having overcome failures with its strap-on solid rocket boosters on two of its four previous flights. In each case, the rocket corrected for those problems and continued into orbit to deploy its payloads. The incidents trigged months-long reviews and investigations before ULA could resume Vulcan flights.
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