United Launch Alliance

On October 2, 2015, an Atlas V lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying a Mexican communications satellite. It was ULA's 100th launch, a milestone reached in under nine years. The company had been built for exactly that kind of steady cadence. Formed in December 2006 as a 50/50 joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, ULA merged the two rivals' competing government launch businesses into a single supplier for the Pentagon and NASA. For roughly a decade it operated as the near-monopoly provider of U.S. national security launches.

The inheritance was two rocket families: Atlas V from Lockheed and the Delta series from Boeing. Atlas V became the workhorse, flying Mars rovers and the New Horizons probe to Pluto. Delta IV Heavy carried the heaviest payloads, and Delta II handled smaller satellites until its 2018 retirement. The Delta line was fully retired by 2024 as attention shifted to a next-generation vehicle.

That vehicle is Vulcan Centaur, in development since 2014. It runs on Blue Origin BE-4 engines and was designed to compete with SpaceX on cost and reusability. Vulcan flew for the first time in January 2024, carrying Astrobotic's Peregrine lunar lander. Commercial work has grown alongside the government business, most visibly Amazon's broadband constellation satellites, which ULA markets as Leo and has launched on Atlas V in batches of up to 29.

The competitive ground has shifted hard. SpaceX has steadily taken national security business that once belonged to ULA by default. In late 2026, after a Vulcan grounding, the Space Force reassigned six national security launches to SpaceX and moved missile-warning and cislunar missions from Vulcan to Falcon Heavy. ULA remains privately held, owned jointly by Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and reporting in September 2026 raised the question of whether financial strain could force its owners to sell. [edit]