{"id":918729,"date":"2026-10-03T05:56:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-03T05:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/918729\/"},"modified":"2026-10-03T05:56:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-03T05:56:12","slug":"on-this-day-in-space-oct-2-2015-the-united-launch-alliance-launches-its-100th-rocket-with-atlas-v-flight-for-mexico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/918729\/","title":{"rendered":"On this day in space! Oct. 2, 2015: The United Launch Alliance launches its 100th rocket with Atlas V flight for Mexico"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Oct. 2, 2015, the United Launch Alliance launched its 100th rocket! The United Launch Alliance (ULA) is a private spaceflight company that was born in 2006 as a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing.<\/p>\n

For its 100th mission<\/a>, ULA launched a Mexican communication satellite named Morelos-3 on an Atlas V rocket<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This wasn’t just the 100th successful mission for the United Launch Alliance<\/a>, but it was also the company’s 100th attempt to launch a rocket. ULA hereby continued its 100% launch success rate.<\/p>\n

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\"An\n<\/p>\n

An Atlas V 421 rocket launched the Morelos-3 mission for Mexico\u2019s Secretaria de Comunicaciones y Transportes (Ministry of Communications and Transportation) on Oct. 2, 2015, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.\u00a0 (Image credit: United Launch Alliance)Why it mattered<\/p>\n

The 100th launch of United Launch Alliance may seem like a quaint milestone in this day and age. (After all, SpaceX alone has launched 116 rockets just this year, including 3 in one day on Oct. 1<\/a>.) But ULA, as a partnership between two aerospace juggernauts in Boeing and Lockheed Martin, reaching that marker was an admirable feat.<\/p>\n

ULA is an odd collaboration between two aerospace rivals that merged their individual rocket launch services into a single entity in order to better bid for contracts and offer more reliable service.<\/p>\n

You may like<\/p>\n

“The DOD endorsed the transaction on the ground that the joint venture would increase launch reliability by concentrating production and launch services in a single team rather than subdividing a declining amount of launch vehicle production and launch preparation activities between two firms,” analyst William Kovacic wrote of the ULA’s birth in his analysis “Competition Policy Retrospective: The Formation of The United Launch Alliance and the Ascent of SpaceX<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

In the space of its first nine years, ULA launched 100 successful missions (which seemed like a lot back then), using its Delta and Atlas rocket families. The final Delta rocket<\/a>, a Delta IV Heavy, launched in 2024 and ULA is now winding down its Atlas V program. The most recent ULA launch was on July 2 of this year, when an Atlas V launched 26 Amazon Leo broadband satellites<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Space\"<\/p>\n

The company has, however, developed a new Vulcan Centaur rocket<\/a>, which it aims to be a new launch workhorse for the company. That rocket has made its debut in 2024 and has flown four times.<\/p>\n

Want more space history? Check out our full On This Day In Space Story archive<\/a> and watch our On This Day In Space videos on YouTube<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"President<\/p>\n

\nOn this day in space! Oct. 1, 1958: Happy Birthday, NASA!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Oct. 2, 2015, the United Launch Alliance launched its 100th rocket! The United Launch Alliance (ULA) is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":918730,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[49,48,66,306],"class_list":["post-918729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=918729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918729\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/918730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=918729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=918729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=918729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}