ULA's new Vulcan rocket launches 'national security' mission from Florida

ULA's new Vulcan rocket to launch 'national security' mission

United Launch Alliance (ULA) successfully launched a Vulcan rocket carrying a national security mission for the U.S. Space Force.

The United Launch Alliance (ULA) launched its first U.S. national security launch aboard its new Vulcan rocket on Tuesday night.

When is the rocket launch?

What we know:

Liftoff was at 8:56 p.m. from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, so expect a brilliant show — with the plume shifting from orange and pink in the low light to bright white as the rocket climbs.

This evening's ULA launch has an 80% chance weatherwise of a, "Go!" 

The national security mission's goal is to place an experimental GPS satellite into geostationary orbit, more than 22,000 miles away. 

Dig deeper:

Typically, GPS satellites orbit around half that distance while completing two orbits of Earth per day. This higher will match the rotation of the Earth, so it'll only complete, "one orbit" per day and appear stationary in the sky.

The only problem with a higher orbit is that the farther it is away, the greater the latency for data transfer, but perhaps for their applications, that's not as important. 

This new orbit may represent the future of GPS, with more than 100 experiments planned to make navigation signals stronger, more accurate, and most importantly harder to jam by bad actors like enemy forces.

Tonight’s launch was also a milestone: it’s the first Vulcan flight since completing its final certification mission on October 4, 2024.