WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: ULA’s New Vulcan Rocket Comes Back to Earth via Helicopter. “ULA’s new Vulcan rocket will use BE-4 engines currently being developed by Blue Origin, the private aerospace company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. They’ll be 20 percent more powerful than the engines currently powering ULA’s Atlas, and Vulcan will be able to handle six strap-on boosters for heavy lifting, as opposed to five on the Atlas. The Vulcan replacement for the Atlas should cost under $100 million, $65 million less than an Atlas launch, and competitive with the SpaceX Falcon. With 65% of the booster costs of the Vulcan wrapped up in the engines, reusability can slash launch costs dramatically. Rather than try to duplicate SpaceX’s not-yet-successful vertical landing to reuse the entire rocket, ULA is planning on reusing just the engines themselves, and to do that, they need to come up with a way of getting them back to Earth in a soft, gentle, non-crashy sort of way.”