“We’re in the process of transitioning the factory to support higher rate production of the Vulcan hardware. “We’ve completed all the Delta hardware there in Decatur,” Wentz said in an interview Tuesday with Spaceflight Now. Gary Wentz, ULA’s vice president for government and commercial programs, said factory workers in Alabama wrapped up assembly and testing of the final Delta 4-Heavy rocket earlier this year, soon before the company shipped the rocket hardware down the Tennessee, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers into the Gulf of Mexico for the trip to Florida’s Space Coast. The Vulcan rocket will also replace ULA’s Atlas 5 launcher, which will fly 19 more times before retirement later in the 2020s. ULA, a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, is retiring the Delta family of rockets in favor of the new-generation Vulcan launch vehicle, which is scheduled to make its first test flight later this year from Cape Canaveral. The final Delta 4 launch in 2024 goes by the designation NROL-70. That mission is slated to lift off early Wednesday from Pad 37B at Cape Canaveral on a mission codenamed NROL-68. The three first stage boosters and upper stage for the final Delta 4-Heavy rocket were trucked from Port Canaveral through the gate to the military-run spaceport in mid-May, while ULA engineers were preparing the second-to-last Delta 4-Heavy rocket for liftoff with a classified satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office, the U.S. They will begin final launch preparations in Florida for the last flight of the Delta rocket program, an historic milestone mission scheduled for early 2024. The major pieces of the final Delta 4-Heavy rocket arrived at Cape Canaveral in May after a journey from ULA’s factory in Decatur, Alabama, on the company’s rocket transport vessel, dubbed the R/S RocketShip. United Launch Alliance has closed its Delta rocket assembly line in Alabama after the 389th and last Delta rocket rolled out of the factory for the journey to its launch base in Florida, clearing real estate in ULA’s sprawling manufacturing center for the next-generation Vulcan launch vehicle.
File photo of Delta 4 rocket boosters inside ULA’s factory in Decatur, Alabama.
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