United Launch Alliance is one of NASA’s key partners for launching spacecraft. However, it plans to make only 10 launches by the end of 2025. This is 50% less than planned last year and is due to the transition period.
Plans of United Launch Alliance
The American company United Launch Alliance (ULA) hopes to increase the number of its rocket launches to 10 by the end of 2025. This was announced by its CEO, Tory Bruno. And this is quite an alarming sign, because in 2024 it was planned that there would be no more than 20 of them.
Halving the number of launches is indeed important for the entire US space industry, as ULA is one of NASA’s key partners. And 2025 is predicted to be a record year for them. However, the circumstances are objectively quite challenging for the company.
ULA has ended the service life of its Atlas 5 launch vehicle, which served as its “workhorse” but used Russian engines. Instead, scheduled operations of the Vulcan Centaur with Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines should begin.
Amazon Kuiper and military orders
Currently, all of ULA’s activities revolve around the launch of Amazon Kuiper satellites, which are expected to form a space communications system that will compete with Starlink. Therefore, they are trying to increase the number of orders from Amazon at any cost.
The company is also very interested in military contracts. Vulcan Centaur was certified for defense satellite launches back in March. However, the first launch under this program is still pending. It will be the USSF-106 mission. However, the launch date has not yet been announced.
Due to years of delays in the development and certification of Vulcan, ULA now has a portfolio of military satellite launches under contract through the National Security Space Launch Phase 2program, which ULA and SpaceX were awarded in 2020.
On the other hand, Amazon is also not doing well and cannot pull its partners forward. The company is facing pressure from regulators to deploy a significant portion of its planned constellation of 3,236 satellites by July 2026 in order to retain its FCC license. The company has committed to investing more than $10 billion in the Koiper project and has secured billions of dollars in launch contracts from several suppliers, with ULA being a key element of this strategy.
Nevertheless, ULA is optimistic about the future. They are confident that once summer is over, things will start to change for the better.
According to spacenews.com
