When does ULA’s Vulcan rocket fly again — and what is it carrying?

ULA’s Vulcan returns to flight on November 13, 2026 after a nine-month grounding over a solid-booster nozzle anomaly, carrying 40 Amazon Leo broadband satellites from Cape Canaveral — the first of 38 Vulcan launches Amazon booked.

Short answer: after nine months on the ground, United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket is cleared to fly again — its return-to-flight mission is scheduled for November 13, 2026 from Cape Canaveral, carrying 40 Amazon Leo broadband satellites. Vulcan was grounded after an anomaly in one of its solid rocket boosters’ nozzles, and this launch is the first of 38 Vulcan missions Amazon has booked to build out its Leo constellation.Why a nozzle problem grounded the whole fleet: the nozzle is the part of a solid booster that shapes and aims the exhaust, and it works under extreme heat and pressure. When one misbehaves in flight — eroding or shedding material it should not — engineers cannot immediately tell whether it was a one-off defect or a flaw shared by every booster from the same production line.

Until they can, the only safe call is to stop flying. A return-to-flight review has to find the root cause, prove the fix works on the ground, and show the failure cannot simply repeat — and the bar is high because Vulcan also flies national-security payloads, not just commercial ones.Why Amazon needs so many Vulcan flights: a broadband constellation only works when hundreds of satellites are spread across orbit closely enough that one is always passing overhead. Each Vulcan can carry about 40 Leo satellites at a time, so filling the constellation — and later replacing satellites as they age out — takes launch after launch on a steady schedule.

Every month Vulcan sat grounded, that schedule slipped, and satellites already built had nowhere to go.What to watch on launch day: the solid boosters’ behaviour in the first two minutes of flight, when the rocket is under its greatest stress, and a clean booster separation once they burn out. After that, the bigger question is whether Vulcan can now settle into the regular cadence Amazon’s 38-launch booking assumes.Pro tip: check ULA’s official mission updates on the morning of launch before planning around a liftoff time. Return-to-flight dates slip for range and weather reasons more readily than routine missions do, and a weeks-old article will not carry the latest countdown status.