// ARS TECHNICA — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Could United Launch Alliance's money problems finally force its owners to sell?
ULA is preparing to resume launching the Vulcan rocket in the coming weeks.
Pretty much every rocket company in the United States, save one, has embraced two fundamental tenets: reusability and diversification.
Most famously, SpaceX branched out from reusable rockets to pursue and dominate a growing spectrum of space services: cargo delivery, human spaceflight, satellite production, broadband, and, perhaps soon, orbital data centers and in-space manufacturing. Blue Origin is evolving from a pure rocket company into a satellite manufacturer, robotics developer, and, most recently, a potential competitor for SpaceX’s Starlink network.
Rocket Lab used a different approach to diversify after achieving success with its small Electron launch vehicle. The company relocated its headquarters from New Zealand to Southern California, started building spacecraft and payloads, and then went on a spree of corporate acquisitions to expand into satellite communications and take on a new role as a merchant supplier of satellite components and sensors. It’s now in a stage of advanced development of its partially reusable next-generation Neutron launch vehicle.
The list goes on. Firefly Aerospace started as a launch company and now builds Moon landers and space tugs. Relativity Space is already looking beyond rockets before ever putting anything into orbit.
They all realize an enduring truth in the space business. Launch is a low-margin business. SpaceX’s financial statements, now open to inspection after the company went public earlier this year, shine a light on this fact. Just 8 percent of the company’s $12.5 billion in revenue during the first half of this year came from launch services. Another 5 percent came from “launch and development” activities, which include SpaceX’s work on things like NASA’s lunar lander program.
SpaceX attributes the rest of its revenue to Starlink and AI. The potential of the latter is almost solely responsible for SpaceX’s post-IPO valuation of approximately $1.8 billion.
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.
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.