WASHINGTON — Tory Bruno, former chief executive of United Launch Alliance, said he decided to join Blue Origin to work on important national security projects, including applications of the company’s Blue Ring spacecraft.
Bruno, the longtime chief executive of ULA, surprised the industry in December when he left the company. Several days later, Blue Origin announced it had hired Bruno as president of its new national security group.
Bruno, who frequently discussed his work on social media while at ULA, has said little publicly since joining Blue Origin. However, during a Feb. 19 webinar organized by the National Space Society, he outlined some of the reasons for his move.
He said he believed ULA was well positioned with the Vulcan rocket now operational, allowing him to focus on national security space issues.
“ULA has Vulcan in service,” he said. “There’s a great and robust technology improvement roadmap in front of them.”
“That meant I could go back and do these other things I’ve been worrying about almost the entire time I was there: the missile defense problem and dynamic space operations,” he said.
He highlighted the importance of dynamic space operations, a term used in the national security space community to describe the ability of spacecraft to maneuver as needed to carry out missions or avoid threats.
“I feel that it’s an urgent need,” he said. “We are behind the need today.”
He cited growing Chinese capabilities to “put threats into orbit” as driving the need for dynamic space operations.
“This environment is getting worse and we’ve got to catch up fast,” he said. “For a long time, I’ve been very concerned about that particular mission and wanted to do something about it. This is one of the reasons why I came to Blue Origin once I felt I was free to take a different path.”
He noted that his portfolio at Blue Origin includes Blue Ring, a highly maneuverable spacecraft bus. The company is offering Blue Ring for both civil and national security applications, including a mission scheduled for launch later this year supported by a Defense Innovation Unit contract.
“It has an enormous amount of delta-v,” Bruno said, referring to change in velocity. “Once it has arrived at its destination orbit, it can maneuver away from that orbit, above it, below it.”
He described other attributes of the spacecraft, including power, communications and edge computing.
“I’m going to put artificial intelligence on the spacecraft so it has a high degree of autonomy as well when it’s on orbit,” he said, adding that Blue Ring ground control centers will also incorporate AI to help operators address spacecraft anomalies or threats.
“It’s a whole other kind of spacecraft, and I’m pretty excited to have this in my portfolio,” he said.
Bruno argued that while Blue Origin is best known for its launch vehicles, it is a “full-service” space company, citing Blue Ring and its Blue Moon lunar landers.
“Blue is a very ambitious, fast-moving company across the whole spectrum,” he said. “We are going to be, not very long from now, one of the dominant and anchor space companies.”
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