Talk Around Town: ULA Says Its 100th Launch Was Flawless — But One Source Ain't So Sure

What the Chatter Says: ULA Hollered '100 and Zero' Real Loud

Well, shoot — back in October 2015, United Launch Alliance was crowing louder than a rooster at sunrise, claiming it had put together a perfect record: 100 missions, 100 successes, not a single scratch on the fender. ULA's own press release declared the company had reached 100 fully successful missions with the Morelos-3 flight, and several outlets repeated that framing. ULA claims this run constitutes a flawless launch record since the company's formation, and some press coverage echoed that self-described milestone without qualification. Now, your humble narrator ain't saying they were flat-out fibbing — but as we'll get to, one independent outlet had a slightly different count in the barn.

Space.com's contemporaneous reporting and AmericaSpace both covered the event as a landmark achievement in American spaceflight. The mission, confirmed by multiple independent sources, lifted off from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on October 2, 2015, at 6:28 a.m. EDT — or 10:28 UTC for you fancy metric-time folks. The payload was Mexico's Morelos-3 communications satellite, riding an Atlas V in the 421 configuration. Those core facts are about as solid as a cast-iron skillet.

What We Actually Know: The Confirmed Facts, Nailed Down Tighter Than a Fence Post

Multiple independent outlets — Space.com, NASASpaceFlight.com, Universe Today, and AmericaSpace — all confirmed the date, vehicle, payload, and milestone number. ULA was formed in December 2006 as a 50/50 joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, combining their respective rocket lines, as confirmed by Universe Today and AmericaSpace. The Morelos-3 mission was indeed ULA's 100th launch; nobody disputes the count itself, just the perfection claim wrapped around it like a bow on a Christmas ham.

NASASpaceFlight.com confirmed that among the 99 missions preceding Morelos-3, ULA had flown 49 Atlas V rockets and 51 Delta rockets — those Delta flights breaking down into 28 Delta II missions and 23 Delta IV flights. According to Wikipedia and Space Coast Daily, Morelos-3 itself rode a Boeing 702HP GeoMobile spacecraft bus and represented the 57th Atlas V launch since that vehicle's 2002 debut, and only the fifth time the 421 configuration had been used. That's a lotta rocket math, and it all checks out.

According to AmericaSpace and Universe Today, Morelos-3 was designed to serve as the primary telecommunications satellite in Mexico's Mexsat constellation, intended to support national security communications, disaster relief, emergency services, telemedicine, and rural education. According to ULA's own press release and Satnews, the mission was procured for Mexico's Ministry of Communications and Transportation by Lockheed Martin Commercial Launch Services, and the slot was moved up on the Atlas V manifest through an agreement with the U.S. Air Force, bumping a previously scheduled GPS satellite like a cousin giving up the good lawn chair.

What Ain't Verified: That Shiny '100 Percent' Buckle Might Have a Scratch

Here's where the mud gets a little thick on the boots. ULA claims a 100 percent success rate across all 100 launches, and that framing was repeated by some outlets as though it were gospel. But NASASpaceFlight.com independently reported that of the 99 missions flown before the Morelos-3 flight, 98 were fully successful — with one partial failure documented on an Atlas V launch carrying an NRO payload back in June 2007. That distinction matters like the difference between winning all your poker hands and winning most of them.

So the milestone number — the 100th launch — is confirmed and uncontested. The '100 percent success rate' claim, however, originates with ULA and is not independently corroborated as fully accurate by at least one specialist outlet. Any time you see that particular boast, you oughta know it's ULA's own description of its record, not a universally agreed-upon settled fact. This publication is keeping both hands on that distinction.

Analysis: What This Retrospective Tells Us About a Changed Sky

Now here's where we put on the thinking cap and call it analysis, because that's what it is — not reporting. Viewed from 2026, ULA's 100-launch milestone looks like a picture of a world that's been flipped upside down like a skillet of cornbread. Space.com noted in its 2026 retrospective that SpaceX alone had launched 116 rockets in a single calendar year, including three in a single day on October 1st. ULA doing 100 launches over roughly nine years suddenly feels like grandpa's fishing pace compared to what's running downstream now.

It's also worth noting, as analysis, that the vehicle types that carried ULA to that 100-launch mark are themselves riding into the sunset. Space.com reported that the Delta IV Heavy flew its final mission in 2024, and ULA is now winding down the Atlas V program as well. The 421 configuration that hauled Morelos-3 skyward is heading for the same barn as the eight-track player. Whether ULA's next-generation Vulcan Centaur can claw back competitive ground is a whole other conversation for another day.

The Morelos-3 mission is a useful snapshot of an era: a deliberate, methodical launch culture that prided itself on reliability above all else, right at the moment that reliability was about to stop being the only game in town. ULA's self-described record — however you choose to count the partial anomaly — represented real engineering discipline. But the launch industry didn't wait around to hand out trophies. That, folks, is the honest-to-goodness analysis from your narrator's perch on the tailgate.