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?
It’s kind of wild that we had two orbital launches from the Cape yesterday, and neither one of them was a Falcon 9.
The lack of transparency of all parties involved makes it difficult to characterize just what the state of things is *right now*. (Note the temporal qualifier.) Amazon tells us very little about the production status of Kuiper/Leo sats (which have been, indeed, experiencing trouble scaling of production), and the USSF and NRO tell us even less about their birds. Tory tells us he’s got rockets stacking up at the Cape, and I believe him, but having completed rockets sitting in storage doesn’t mean it is in a position to launch them, because we do not know what the state of their launch teams and infrastructure is at present. I follow the NSF threads on Vulcan, and even over there knowledgable regulars are mostly forced to speculate about where things stand.
If there’s frustration with giving ULA the benefit of the doubt now, it’s due in no small part to the extensive criticism that ULA has been getting from the Pentagon, publicly and privately, over the last couple of years over Vulcan development delays. Just back in May, Major General Stephen G. Purdy, acting assistant secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration, told the U.S. Senate in written testimony that “The ULA Vulcan program has performed unsatisfactorily this past year.” Last year, Frank Calvelli of the Air Force wrote to ULA and said he was “growing concerned” about the company’s ability to scale manufacturing of the Vulcan rocket and meet the military’s cadence needs. Calvelli noted that ULA had a backlog of more than two dozen national security missions that were “sitting on the ground” due to delays. Is that still the case? I don’t know.
Well mkent gives a good argument for the business model of SpaceX and what may be the business model of Blue Origin, eventually. Have a reliable backlog of cloud sats to launch and then schedule in other customers as they can ship you the payload. The military is ok with a prime source, like SpaceX and then a second source, which could be a reliable Blue Origin in a year.
Keeping ULA alive may not be a priority for customers that have been burned. Contract chicken. The other tricky thing here for sigint market is that engineers have had years now to consider the difference between a few huge billion dollar sats and a grid of thousands of sats. There used to be only one proven way to do it.
A lot of the testing of Starship in so many modes has got to be also for the benefit of modeling what will happen, planning what should happen, when landing on Mars. Never saw anybody say that, but it is obvious you can not build a big enough wind tunnel to test in this regime, so you have to do all the measurements using entry from LEO to where the air density gets too high.
”Have a reliable backlog of cloud sats to launch and then schedule in other customers as they can ship you the payload.”
That also is what ULA is now doing. They have the largest Kuiper contract, scheduled to launch as many Kuiper satellites as all other launch providers combined.
”Well mkent gives a good argument for the business model of SpaceX…”
On this you are correct. The business models of SpaceX and ULA are very different.
SpaceX is a space company founded by a man whose stated goal is to make life multi-planetary. Thus it does all things space: launch vehicles, manned and unmanned capsules, lunar and planetary landers, depots, tankers, and payloads for all of the above.
ULA is a *launch* company founded by two aerospace companies with large space divisions. All they do is launch per their charter. In fact, it’s more restrictive than that. All they do is launch EELV-class payloads on expendable launch vehicles. That’s why it was founded.
If you want to do anything else, such as launch small payloads (Athena), launch large payloads (SLS), re-usable launch vehicles (Venture Star or Delta Clipper), build a payload (Lockheed Martin or Boeing Satellite Systems), a manned or unmanned capsule (Starliner or Orion), a cislunar transport (Lockheed), a space station module (Boeing), or anything else in space, you have to go to one of the founders, not ULA. ULA was created for one reason only: to launch EELV-class payloads on ELVs.
So, no, ULA doesn’t compare to SpaceX. Its charter is very different. But if you want to launch an EELV-class payload, it will do that for you. If you want to launch a whole lot of them, it will build out the infrastructure to do that, as it is now doing for Kuiper. It is very customer-driven *within its charter*.
It seems a lot of people want it to be another SpaceX, and that it will never be. Look to its parents for those other things.
I think the problem is, though, that their business model has always been built on being driven by ONE customer: the Defense Department. (Yes, I count the NRO within this rubric.) ULA is really just a federal contractor. Every rocket they have operated has been expressly designed to DoD needs. Even when ULA was trying to make a mild effort to pick up some commercial business in the late 00’s, they were doing it with launchers designed for milsat needs. And such launches were always icing on the cake: they were (like the occasional mission for NASA) nice to pick up, but they could close their business case without ’em. And the same is true of the Kuiper/Leo launch contract, however big its number happens to look.
And that was not an unreasonable business case, so long as that customer was willing to keep steering that requisite amount of business to ULA. Unfortunately, that is increasingly NOT the case now.
Vulcan’s manifest consists of NSSL launches and Kuiper/Leo launches (Dream Chaser looks increasingly doubtful as being able to commit to its contractual launches now.) It’s a pretty sizable manifest, to be sure, but it is NOT diversified; and it is fair to wonder what is going to happen when they finish working their way through it by 2030 or thereabouts. Whereas SpaceX’s constant barrage of Starlink launches should not obscure the fact that it really *does* have a diverse manifest. Already in 2025 they have launched 39 non-Starlink payloads, which would be more than enough to keep Falcon 9 profitable. And 39 flights is roughly three times as much as ULA was launching in a typical year at their peak!
ULA’s real threat isn’t even SpaceX at this point. Its threat is that it loses the race to be whatever viable Not-SpaceX launch providers survive when the music stops and there’s only a couple chairs left to sit on by the end of the decade.
mkent wrote: “All they do is launch EELV-class payloads on expendable launch vehicles. That’s why it was founded.”
I disagree to some degree.
In the 1990s, the DoW (nee Department of Defense) created the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle concept for its own use, for which Lockheed Martin and Boeing agreed to make suitable rockets. The net result was that the rockets, designed for government launches, were too expensive for commercial launches (communication satellites being the only commercial launches at the time), and government launches were too infrequent and unpredictable for either company to adequately price any given launch. The main problem being that the individual rockets had predictable unit costs, but the costs for the launch pads were fixed per year. In years with many launches, the relative per-flight cost of maintaining the pad was low, but in years with few launches, the pad contributed much more per launch. Pricing a launch at the time of the order for the rocket (a couple of years or so in advance) was impossible.
The solution chosen was to merge the two competitors’ EELV units into one company so that fixed costs were better contained and were lower per launch. The launch contracts were split into two parts, part one paid for the rocket, and part two paid for pad maintenance. The second part is often seen as a subsidy for ULA, but it is merely a fixed price contract. This way, ULA is paid for pad maintenance and each rocket launch is a well established price, depending upon the rocket. Consistent pricing is why ULA was founded.
More accurately, it was founded as a workaround of the virtual destruction of the U.S. launch industry by governmental mismanagement and interference with the free-market system.
Because SpaceX launches so many rockets per year, its pad costs per launch are much lower than they were a decade ago, when its launch cadence was 1/10th what it is now. ULA, on the other hand, has yet to increase its launch cadence enough to forgo its “part 2” contract. SpaceX is winning in the worldwide free market.
Unfortunately, when ULA created a single rocket, the Vulcan, to replace its LM and Boeing rockets, it made impossible the separation of the company back into its former two constituent parts. To misquote somebody (Walter Scott?): ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave when at first we merge the competitors.’
”…their business model has always been built on being driven by ONE customer: the Defense Department.”
That is correct. ULA was actually founded to launch US government (DoD, NRO, NOAA, and NASA) EELV-class payloads. It was allowed to branch out into commercial and foreign government EELV-class payloads because that business is about 98% similar.
But note that ULA is spending a lot of money on infrastructure (new processing facilities, new VIF, new MLP, partial ACES, possible SMART re-use) solely to meet the needs of its major commercial customer. That is why I say they are customer-driven. But they’re not really commercial in that they won’t spend money to grow their own market generically (as in “Build it and they will come.”) like SpaceX did with Falcon 9 re-usability.
”…it is fair to wonder what is going to happen when they finish working their way through it by 2030 or thereabouts.”
It is very fair. I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t think anyone does. Ordinarily I’d expect one partner to buy out the other. But Lockheed is a government contractor. They don’t do commercial business. And Boeing is almost all-hands-on-deck to get its commercial aircraft division out of the $52 billion hole they dug themselves into. They don’t have the money.
It may be that ULA, having completed its primary mission, lives on as a shadow of its former self like the March of Dimes. Or maybe they close-up shop and the parents divvy up the assets like children at their parents’ estate sale. I’m kind of partial to the old MacDAC, whose spirit lives on in ULA, so I hope it doesn’t come to either of those possibilities, but I don’t know.
Well, that, and also a certain notorious case of industrial espionage by one of the launch providers in question against the other!
I would like the sing one necessary praise of the EELV program: The other objective set for it that it succeeding in meeting was more *reliable* launch. DoD had been stung by the loss of numerous expensive payloads in the 80’s and 90’s, and they wanted to do something about that.
The EELV program, especially once it was taken over by ULA as sole contractor, did meet that objective, and that was no small thing. ULA has never lost a payload.
Unfortunately for ULA, this is no longer a sufficient virtue in the 2020’s launch market.
”More accurately, it was founded as a workaround of the virtual destruction of the U.S. launch industry by governmental mismanagement and interference with the free-market system.”
I don’t really want to get into the early history of the EELV program — the comments get long and historical — but you probably don’t know how right you are with that sentence.
But let me add that Ariane subsidies were a major part of it too. I don’t think many people realize just how big those subsidies were — in the billions. Development costs for Arianespace were often three or four times what Boeing paid to develop equivalent systems, and those costs were all paid by the European governments. Operating subsidies were on top of that.
”Well, that, and also a certain notorious case of industrial espionage by one of the launch providers in question against the other!”
As I said, I don’t want to get into it all again. The industrial espionage was real, but the malfeasance was much bigger and more widespread than that. There’s a reason the Air Force and Lockheed wanted to stay out of court.
mkent,
I don’t know what they’re thinking, either. Nor do I have access to their internal finances beyond what Boeing and LockMart put on their 10-K’s. If I were going to going to steelman a case for ULA’s survival, though, perhaps it might look like this:
Demand side: Assume that in the next two phases of NSSL, Blue Origin and Lane 1 awards will hack their total share of NSSL launch dollars down to only 20-30%, but the total pie of Pentagon launch activity will grow so much thanks to Golden Dome and distributed networks that they can still get a hefty stack of launch money out of that 20-30%; further assume that internet and even AI constellation will grow so much that there will be so much demand for Not-SpaceX launch providers that the new market entrants cannot cover it all.
Supply side: Assume that some entity with an interest in ULA besides revenue extraction buys the company and is willing to commit aggressively to SMART reuse and perhaps even development of a follow-on to Vulcan that emplots first stage reuse centered on BE-4’s (to save time, you know), and that ULA can rehape their org enough to nimbly execute on.
I have to admit, the steelman case underwhelms me, because some key assumptions are rather shaky. ULA is in good shape through the end of the decade thanks to their existing contracted manifest, and good on Tory for securing all that, but … after that, the bets really are off.
mkent wrote: “… but you probably don’t know how right you are with that sentence.”
Oh, yes I do! Not only did we almost lose our entire ability to launch to orbit, but we missed at least two opportunities for development of a commercial launch industry. How much sooner would we have had low cost launches and how much sooner would we have had reusable launch vehicles if we hadn’t missed either of those opportunities? We now could be three or five decades behind where we could have been.
“But let me add that Ariane subsidies were a major part of it too. I don’t think many people realize just how big those subsidies were — in the billions. Development costs for Arianespace were often three or four times what Boeing paid to develop equivalent systems, and those costs were all paid by the European governments. Operating subsidies were on top of that.”
Ariane was definitely more competitive than the EELVs, and the European subsidies may have been why. The Europeans tried to rationalize their subsidies by claiming that the contract with ULA for pad maintenance was also a subsidy, but it was not. It was a legitimate second contract that quantified the cost of annual pad maintenance.
“[Ariane] Operating subsidies were on top of that.”
These were in the hundreds of millions per year. Over the years and decades, they may have even exceeded the Ariane development subsidies.
____________
Richard M,
Supply side is what drove the revolution in the space industry. Between SpaceX bringing down the price of access to orbit, the CubeSat standardizing tiny satellites, and an industry making standardized small parts also brining down the price of small satellites, an entire industry blossomed.
Potential space companies had been demanding reduced access costs and better satellite costs. In the mid 1980s, a group formed with the purpose of bringing back small satellites, the size and weight that was popular in the 1960s, but it took more than a decade for the satellite industry to create such a supply, and it mostly happened because launch prices came down — an increase in the supply of inexpensive launches.
Demand side is what drove SpaceX to create the Transporter mission option. The small satellite launch companies were not becoming operational fast enough to supply the demand for all the small satellites, and SpaceX filled that niche with a system that requires some amount of compromise on the customer’s part.
However, the demand for smallsat launches did not develop in the mid 2000s. It was not in time for SpaceX’s Falcon 1, forcing SpaceX to move on to a larger launch vehicle, the Falcon 9. The demand for smallsat launches happened closer to the mid 2010s and is very strong today. In fact, another Transporter launch (Transporter 15) is scheduled for Wednesday, November 19.
Hello Edward,
Oh, absolutely.