Rocket Lab’s financials paint a similar picture. It reported $434 million in revenue for the first half of 2026 and credited a quarter of it to launch services.
Pigeonholed
Given all this, what are we to make of the company that SpaceX supplanted as the country’s leading launch provider?
United Launch Alliance, founded in 2006, was born in an era when the US government was the dominant force in the domestic launch market. Commercial launch demand was on the wane, and what demand there was often went to launch providers in Europe or Russia. Executives at the two leading US launch companies—Boeing and Lockheed Martin—knew they were in trouble. Boeing’s Delta IV rocket program, in particular, was in danger of going out of business.
The situation jeopardized the US government’s policy of ensuring two separate rocket types are available to launch national security payloads into orbit. With the government’s blessing, Boeing and Lockheed entered into a 50-50 joint venture, merging their Delta and Atlas rocket programs under one roof. The merger all but erased competition from the US launch market. However, the sole-source paradigm proved lucrative for ULA’s corporate parents, which each reported hundreds of millions of dollars in earnings from ULA per year in the first decade of the company’s existence.
SpaceX sued the US Air Force in 2014 for the right to compete for military launch contracts, and the Pentagon relented the following year, making SpaceX eligible to bid against ULA. SpaceX won its first high-priority military launch contract in 2016, a few months after the company landed its reusable Falcon 9 booster for the first time.
This moment was a turning point for ULA and the start of a long slide from dominance for the Boeing-Lockheed venture. Around the same time, ULA kicked off development of a new rocket, the Vulcan, to replace the legacy Atlas V and Delta IV rockets. But officials did not prioritize reusability in Vulcan’s design, with no plans to reuse the rocket’s booster stage and only tentative plans to eventually recover and reuse Vulcan’s main engines. A decade later, ULA’s half-hearted stab at reusability hasn’t gone anywhere.