Amazon is investing 120 million dollars into a new Florida facility to prep its

internet satellites for launch. Kuiper is the tech giant's multi-billion dollar

plan to build a mega constellation offering broadband service from space to customers on Earth.

The first two prototypes will head to orbit on the new Vulcan centaur from United

Launch Alliance, which is the joint rocket venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

Vulcan suffered a mishap in March after a propellant tank cracked and ignited into a fireball.

But ULA CEO Tori Bruno says it's made in flight, which will have those payloads for

Amazon, as well as others, is still set to happen this year.

This was an acceptance test failure, which will happen again, happens in a production run on a rocket,

somewhere on the rocket, pretty much every month, and it won't be news once, you know,

once the other things we're doing are less interesting the ones

at the launch site have already been through this successfully and even been hop fired

in a flight readiness firing I literally have nothing else to do to qualify the Vulcan

rocket other than reinforce the top of a steel tank so it's a little bit stronger. That's happening right now. On this

episode Bruno discusses the plan for Vulcan, the launch market's capacity

crunch, which is due thanks in part to Amazon, and the space race between the US and China.

I'm Morgan Brennan and this is Manifest Space.

I think there's now a pretty widespread appreciation that for us space is no longer just a force multiplier.

It's absolutely required for basic military effectiveness. We've come to grips with that. We appreciate now that China knows it and they are moving fast in terms of developing and deploying anti-satellite capabilities.

So now it is a little bit of a fever pitch because we have to deal with this problem urgently.

So what does that mean for ULA specifically?

Well, it means that we need to do more than just be the two-space transportation capability,

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