There's still work to be done, but United Launch Alliance has announced a path forward to finally get its new Vulcan Centaur rocket to its first launch.

The company sent an update Saturday announcing it had figured out what went wrong, and what needs fixing at its Alabama test facility that resulted in a fireball that damaged a test article of the Centaur V upper stage this spring.

"Centaur's thin-walled pressure stabilized tanks require minor reinforcement at the top of the forward dome prior to flight," the company stated in a press release.

That means the Centaur currently mated to the Vulcan first stage at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station that is tapped to fly on that rocket's first mission has to head back to Alabama to get that reinforcement.

The first and second stages recently completed a Flight Readiness Firing test at Canaveral's Space Launch Complex 41, and ULA said results of that hot fire hit all of the test objectives.

But now teams will de-stack the combined rocket and send Centaur V to ULA's Decatur, Alabama facility for the fix while the first-stage booster will be stored at ULA's Horizontal Integration Facility at Canaveral waiting for its return.

A new space telescope named Euclid, an ESA (European Space Agency) mission with important contributions from NASA, is set to launch in July to explore why the universe's expansion is speeding up. Scientists call the unknown cause of this cosmic acceleration "dark energy." By May 2027, NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will join Euclid to explore this puzzle in ways that have never been possible before.

"Twenty-five years after its discovery, the universe's accelerated expansion remains one of the most pressing mysteries in astrophysics," said Jason Rhodes, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Rhodes is a deputy project scientist for Roman and the U.S. science lead for Euclid. "With these upcoming telescopes, we will measure dark energy in different ways and with far more precision than previously achievable, opening up a new era of exploration into this mystery.