On Oct. 2, 2015, the United Launch Alliance launched its 100th rocket! The United Launch Alliance (ULA) is a private spaceflight company that was born in 2006 as a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
For its 100th mission, ULA launched a Mexican communication satellite named Morelos-3 on an Atlas V rocket.
This wasn't just the 100th successful mission for the United Launch Alliance, but it was also the company's 100th attempt to launch a rocket. ULA hereby continued its 100% launch success rate.
Why it mattered
The 100th launch of United Launch Alliance may seem like a quaint milestone in this day and age. (After all, SpaceX alone has launched 116 rockets just this year, including 3 in one day on Oct. 1.) But ULA, as a partnership between two aerospace juggernauts in Boeing and Lockheed Martin, reaching that marker was an admirable feat.
ULA is an odd collaboration between two aerospace rivals that merged their individual rocket launch services into a single entity in order to better bid for contracts and offer more reliable service.
"The DOD endorsed the transaction on the ground that the joint venture would increase launch reliability by concentrating production and launch services in a single team rather than subdividing a declining amount of launch vehicle production and launch preparation activities between two firms," analyst William Kovacic wrote of the ULA's birth in his analysis "Competition Policy Retrospective: The Formation of The United Launch Alliance and the Ascent of SpaceX."
In the space of its first nine years, ULA launched 100 successful missions (which seemed like a lot back then), using its Delta and Atlas rocket families. The final Delta rocket, a Delta IV Heavy, launched in 2024 and ULA is now winding down its Atlas V program. The most recent ULA launch was on July 2 of this year, when an Atlas V launched 26 Amazon Leo broadband satellites.
The company has, however, developed a new Vulcan Centaur rocket, which it aims to be a new launch workhorse for the company. That rocket has made its debut in 2024 and has flown four times.
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