I'm hoping ULA betting the farm on BO engines isn't going to bite them in the arse, that's my biggest fear in this.
I want the the BE-4 to work for ULA's sake at least but I would have liked to have seen at least 1 or 2 test flights before putting a $$$$$ payload on top but that's me.
BO's credibility rides on that same first Vulcan launch.
I'd love to be a fly on the wall for the negotiations with BO representatives. Dollars to donuts, Boeing and LockMart have BO at a fixed, non-negotiable price that is not open to renegotiation based on performance of debut Vulcan launches.
It's really a shame, but ULA was buried in the field out back when the first F9 landed, and they didn't pursue an equivalent vehicle. Vulcan isn't that vehicle. SMART is a wish list, not an action item. They have to stage lower to have a reasonable chance of booster re-use, and that means they need to redesign their 2nd stage, which is currently their only competitive advantage. Anything Vulcan can do, F9/FH can also do and at lower cost. And at this point with over 200 consecutive successful LANDINGS in a row, not just launches and insertions, F9/FH is the safe and proven bet while Vulcan is very much the wild card, as well as more expensive. All that keeps them afloat is DOD desire for launch vendor redundancy, which RocketLab is very hungry to take away from ULA in the next year or so. If Neutron can fly for less than Vulcan, it's over for ULA.
My money is on a mission failure for the first Vulcan, though. Jeff's engines seem to be very temperamental, and one particular regime they haven't gotten any flight data on is riding in tandem with several SRB's. There will be a pair of GEM 63XL SRB's strapped alongside Jeff's engines, shaking the *expletive deleted*it out of the whole stack. Those SRB's are each putting out about 450k pounds of thrust (900k total) where the two BE-4's are each putting out about 550k pounds of thrust (1.1 million total). They're big SRB's.
