“Early this morning, SpaceX launched the final GPS III satellite in our constellation, the most advanced GPS satellites ever built,” Space Force Gen. Chance Saltzman announced on Tuesday. It’s the finishing touch, as Chronos Intelligence explained, in a “constellation that every smartphone, every ship, every aircraft and every missile guidance system on Earth depends on.”
SpaceX might just call it “Tuesday.”
Elon Musk’s launch company is about to raise tens of billions in the biggest-ever IPO on its way to easily top a $1 trillion valuation — and no wonder. This morning’s Space Force mission was its 48th Falcon 9 launch of the year (with a 100% success rate) and on track to roughly match last year’s record-breaking launch cadence.
Meanwhile, the company is making final preparations for the next flight test of the massive Starship rocket that will not only make the Falcon 9 obsolete, but every other rocket in the world.
But I’m not here today to praise Musk or SpaceX. I just needed to set the stage to show you how the competition is performing. Or not. Because Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance (ULA) are having a rough time.
Blue Origin whiffed a major New Glenn mission on Sunday, putting a $30 million AST SpaceMobile cellular satellite into the wrong orbit. Bluebird 7 is so low that it lacks enough onboard fuel to boost itself to its proper orbit, and will have to be de-orbited as a total loss. AST SpaceMobile shares were down sharply on Monday and have yet to fully recover.
BO touted the launch as a success — they did recover the booster, which is always impressive. And the booster was partially reused, which is even more impressive.
But the mission was a failure, and celebrating that is not a good look.
New Glenn is “likely grounded for four months” to investigate what went wrong with the upper stage, according to Next Big Future’s Brian Wang.
Meanwhile, ULA’s Vulcan workhorse — well, sort of — is grounded following two Northrop Grumman solid rocket booster failures.
Folks, space is too big and too important for the United States of America to have just one reliable launch provider.
True story.
SpaceX successfully landed an orbital launch vehicle — the now-venerable Falcon 9 — in late 2015. Just 15 months later, in early 2017, the company successfully re-flew a “flight proven” Falcon 9. Here we are, more than nine years later, and Blue Origin is only now becoming the second company anywhere in the world to master reusable rockets.
I watched those early SpaceX efforts in total amazement, and not just because one of my closest friends was an actual rocket surgeon at ULA. Ed was very good at his job and had the bonus checks for nailing satellite orbital placement to prove it.
So I asked him one time why ULA wasn’t looking into reusability.
“We did look into it, we’re not idiots,” he said. “We’re good engineers. We could do it, but the economics didn’t work out.” Making a rocket reusable comes with tradeoffs, and ULA didn’t see enough demand for lift to make those compromises financially worthwhile.
SpaceX created Starlink, which generates the demand and the cash flow to keep the company ahead of the competition. My friend was right that ULA had plenty of engineering talent, but the corporate management lacked imagination.
Because, as the country’s only major launch company for so long, ULA didn’t need imaginative management — they just needed the next NASA or Pentagon launch. And those were basically guaranteed at the slow-but-steady cadence that the company’s disposable Atlas and Delta rockets could deliver.
For what it’s worth, not long after that conversation, ULA “voluntold” engineering graybeards like my friend — actually guys as young as their early 50s — to retire. I couldn’t tell you for sure that retiring the most experienced engineering talent is directly responsible for ULA’s current woes, but there’s more than enough room there for conjecture.
ULA’s busiest year was 2016 with a total of 16 launches. After that, the company began transitioning to the troubled Vulcan Centaur rocket, which launched just five times in 2025, and is currently “paused” while Northrop Grumman works out issues with the solid rocket boosters — after a decade of development and transition.
SpaceX conducted 165 Falcon 9 launches in 2025 with a 100% success rate.
It isn’t so much that ULA or BO are doomed or anything remotely like that. Anyone with an understanding of rockets will tell you that Vulcan and New Glenn are absolute beasts. But we’re in a new space race, and both companies seem to lack the necessary urgency.
We shouldn’t have to rely on a single reliable launch provider in what’s supposed to be America’s grand new space age. But just look at the competition.
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