When Tory Bruno, the CEO of United Launch Alliance (ULA), talks about optimizing rockets for “high-energy” versus being optimized for “low-energy”, he is referring to the capabilities and design priorities of different launch vehicles.
- Bruno argues that ULA’s Vulcan rocket is a “high-energy” rocket designed for demanding missions like direct injection of payloads into geostationary orbit. He contrasts this with “low-energy” rockets that he says are “hyperoptimized” for launching spacecraft into low Earth orbit (LEO).
- He claims that for high-energy missions, Vulcan is about 34% cheaper than SpaceX’s offerings, implying SpaceX’s rockets are more optimized for LEO.
- However, Bruno also acknowledges that nearly half of Vulcan’s current launch backlog is for Amazon’s Project Kuiper, which is a large LEO constellation. This seems to contradict his point about Vulcan being mainly for high-energy missions.
- Bruno emphasizes that rockets are engineering machines targeted at specific tasks, and that different rockets are suited for different applications, cautioning against having a “favorite rocket”.
When discussing optimizing for “high-energy” vs “low-energy”, Tory Bruno is highlighting that ULA has designed Vulcan to excel at challenging high-energy trajectories to distant orbits, while suggesting that competitors like SpaceX have rockets more optimized for high-volume LEO satellite deployments. However, Vulcan will still serve a mix of high-energy and LEO missions.
