ULA — the perfect record

United Launch Alliance is what the establishment looks like when it's genuinely excellent: more than 160 consecutive launches without losing a payload, across two decades. Every Mars rover NASA has ever landed rode a ULA (or heritage) rocket. Reliability this monotonous is the rarest commodity in rocketry — and now the company is spending it on a reinvention.

The most boring streak in rocketry

ULA was formed in 2006 by merging the launch divisions of Boeing and Lockheed Martin — Delta and Atlas, bloodlines running back to the first ICBMs. Since then it has flown national-security payloads, science flagships, and everything between with a 100% mission success record. Curiosity, Perseverance, New Horizons, Juno, Parker Solar Probe, OSIRIS-REx — when the payload was irreplaceable, this was the phone number.

The knock was always price, and the knock had teeth once landing-and-reflying became normal next door. ULA's answer was to retire both bloodlines at their peak and bet everything on one new vehicle.

Farewell to the dragon

Delta IV Heavy launches were the best free show in Florida: at ignition the vehicle set fire to itself — hydrogen burn-off flames climbing the boosters — then rose on three orange cores like something out of mythology. It flew the nation's most sensitive payloads and, once, NASA's Orion capsule on its first test. The final Delta flew in April 2024, ending a family line begun in 1960.

One rocket to replace two

Vulcan Centaur is the consolidation: one vehicle spanning the Atlas and Delta performance range, its first stage powered by Blue Origin BE-4 engines — American engines at last, ending Atlas's politically awkward dependence on Russian RD-180s. It debuted in January 2024 carrying a commercial lunar lander, flew its second certification mission that fall, and earned U.S. Space Force certification for national-security launches in 2025. The order book was thick before it ever flew, anchored by dozens of missions for Amazon's Kuiper constellation. The streak now rides on the new machine — and the streak is the brand.

The ledger