United Launch Alliance

United Launch Alliance exists because in 2006 Boeing and Lockheed Martin decided that competing for a shrinking pile of US government launches was worse for both of them than sharing it. The two companies folded their Delta and Atlas programmes into a fifty-fifty joint venture, and despite years of reporting that a sale was close, the ownership has not changed. Around 2,700 people work for it. Engineering and headquarters sit in Centennial, Colorado, rocket manufacture happens in a 1.6 million square foot plant in Decatur, Alabama, and launches fly from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral and Space Launch Complex 3E at Vandenberg. Atlas and Delta had both flown for decades before the joint venture existed, and ULA inherited the two lines along with the engineers who ran them. Both pads are leased from the US government and operated by ULA's own crews. The pitch to the US government has always been schedule certainty and mission assurance rather than price, and for most of two decades it was the only provider certified to carry the heaviest national security payloads.

The fleet is mid-transition. Delta IV Heavy flew its final mission in April 2024 and is gone. Atlas V is being run down with all remaining vehicles already assigned and no new orders accepted, having passed 100 missions. Vulcan Centaur is the replacement and the reason the company still has a future. Vulcan was also designed to get the Russian RD-180 engine out of the American launch fleet, a dependency that became politically impossible after 2014. It flew first in January 2024 carrying the Peregrine lunar lander, completed its second certification flight that October, and is designed around a pair of Blue Origin BE-4 methalox engines on the first stage with the Centaur V upper stage above. Centaur V is the interesting part of the vehicle, a stretched cryogenic stage built for the long loiter and multiple restarts that direct-inject national security orbits demand. Solid augmentation comes from Northrop Grumman GEM 63 and GEM 63XL boosters, up to six at a time, and the RL10 remains the upper stage engine as it has on Atlas and Centaur for sixty years.

The order book is split between two very different customers. National Security Space Launch Phase 2 gave ULA roughly sixty percent of assigned missions from 2022, and an April 2025 award worth about 5.3 billion dollars added 19 missions running out to 2034. The other half is Amazon, which booked 47 launches for the Kuiper broadband constellation across nine Atlas V and 38 Vulcan flights, the largest commercial launch order the company has taken. Alongside the vehicles it sells mission integration, payload accommodation and analysis work, which for national security customers is much of what they are actually buying. Leadership turned over at the end of 2025, when Tory Bruno, chief executive since 2014, left to run national security work at Blue Origin.