ULA’s Atlas-5 rocket launches Viasat communications satellite
ULA tonight successfully launched a Viasat communications satellite, its Atlas-5 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
This was the fifth launch for ULA in 2025, matching its count from last year. For the past year the company has repeatedly promised a launch rate of once to twice a month, but as yet to do so. In fact, it hasn’t managed twelve launches in a year since 2016. Hopefully this will change in the coming year.
With this launch, ULA only has eleven Atlas-5s left in stock before the rocket is retired, with five of those launches for Amazon’s Kuiper constellation and six for Boeing’s Starliner manned capsule. While the Kuiper launches will almost certainly happen by the end of 2026, the Boeing Starliner missions are very much in limbo, as that capsule itself remains in limbo with it entirely unclear when it will carry astronauts again for NASA.
As this was only the fifth launch by ULA in 2025, the leader board for the 2025 launch race remains unchanged:
147 SpaceX
70 China
14 Rocket Lab
13 Russia
SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 147 to 117.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
ULA tonight successfully launched a Viasat communications satellite, its Atlas-5 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
This was the fifth launch for ULA in 2025, matching its count from last year. For the past year the company has repeatedly promised a launch rate of once to twice a month, but as yet to do so. In fact, it hasn’t managed twelve launches in a year since 2016. Hopefully this will change in the coming year.
With this launch, ULA only has eleven Atlas-5s left in stock before the rocket is retired, with five of those launches for Amazon’s Kuiper constellation and six for Boeing’s Starliner manned capsule. While the Kuiper launches will almost certainly happen by the end of 2026, the Boeing Starliner missions are very much in limbo, as that capsule itself remains in limbo with it entirely unclear when it will carry astronauts again for NASA.
As this was only the fifth launch by ULA in 2025, the leader board for the 2025 launch race remains unchanged:
147 SpaceX
70 China
14 Rocket Lab
13 Russia
SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 147 to 117.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
”ULA tonight successfully launched a Viasat communications satellite…”
Not yet it hasn’t. As I type this Centaur still has another burn to raise perigee and lower inclination before payload release.
You know, one of these days — hopefully not this day — your premature declaration of success is going to come back to bite you.
”For the past year the company has repeatedly promised a launch rate of once to twice a month, but as yet to do so. In fact, it hasn’t managed twelve launches in a year since 2016.”
What are you expecting them to launch?
As I said in another thread, ULA is a customer-driven organization. It doesn’t have excess capacity, and it doesn’t build payloads. It launches them when they show up at the launch site. ULA’s flight rate is, and has been since its inception, driven entirely by those payloads.
If you want to increase ULA’s flight rate, send them some payloads.
mkent: I am surprised you are unaware of ULA’s 46 launch contract with Amazon to launch Kuiper satellites, of which the company has only completed three. Moreover, Tory Bruno has twice promised the company would be launching a lot more since 2024, as follows:
December 2024: In ’25 we’ll do 20 launches.
It is obvious the company will not come close to that mark this year.
August 2025: We will do 2 launches per month for the rest of the year, and then 24 launches in 2026.
Since that August prediction ULA has accomplished three launches (one Vulcan and two Atlas-5s), so that’s about one launch per month, definitely an improvement but still half the pace of Bruno’s prediction.
ULA has plenty of payloads in its manifest. It has simply been slow to get that launch pace up as promised.
OK, *now* the launch can be declared a success.
”ULA has plenty of payloads in its manifest.”
Yes, but none of them were ready for launch. ULA currently has 11 Atlas Vs and seven Vulcans fully assembled waiting for payloads. Until the customers ship the payloads to ULA, ULA can’t launch them.
”I am surprised you are unaware of ULA’s 46 launch contract with Amazon to launch Kuiper satellites, of which the company has only completed three.”
I am surprised that you are unaware that ULA can’t launch satellites that haven’t been built yet. Amazon is running years behind schedule in production of Kuiper satellites. They signed their contract with ULA in April of 2021 to begin launching satellites in the first quarter of 2022. The first satellite didn’t arrive at the launch site until April of **2025**. ULA launched it and 26 of its friends at the end of that same month and continues to launch others whenever a batch arrives at the Cape.
Likewise Boeing is years behind schedule with its Starliner spacecraft. ULA launches those too whenever it gets one. Then there’s DreamChaser. It was supposed to be ready years ago. ULA is still waiting for the *first* one of those. And the military payloads. ULA has seven Vulcans fully assembled waiting for them. Still waiting.
Case in point: USSF-106. ULA actually stacked the Vulcan for it in the VIF *last year* expecting it to arrive shortly thereafter. It didn’t. Everyone thought the wait was for Vulcan certification. But Vulcan certification happened in March. The spacecraft wasn’t even shipped to the launch site until June 5th. Then it had another six weeks of on-site processing before it could be encapsulated into its payload fairing for launch.
The next military payload was supposed to be USSF-87. The Vulcan for it has been ready and waiting for over a year, and the military has pre-emption rights over commercial launches. The fact that ULA has been launching commercial Kuiper and Viasat satellites suggests to me that it still isn’t ready, nor is any other military payload.
So what should ULA have been launching this whole time while their rockets were stacked up like cordwood and their workforce stood idle?