Main Engine Cut Off

RocketBuilder is the culmination of several efforts from ULA. Tory Bruno has said time and time again that ULA needs to enter the commercial market if they want to stick around in the next era of launch services. The way they’ve decided to start on that is to sell their biggest advantage: reliability. They’re even putting a monetary figure on their reliability as part of RocketBuilder.

The other half of the strategy is RapidLaunch. Selling reliability coupled with the ability to get flying within months is a great first step towards the commercial market, and it really shows that ULA understands their competitive advantage.

Today’s announcement wasn’t earth-shattering by any means. We’ve been following this strategy’s development for months, and I spent an entire podcast episode discussing it (worth a listen!). Getting a direct look at Atlas V pricing is very interesting, but again, we had a general sense of it from reading between the lines.

The announcement didn’t contain breaking news or mind-blowing visions of the future, but that doesn’t mean it was entirely inconsequential. It showed that ULA is learning how to speak to the market, and they’re finding new ways to reach out to potential customers. We’ll see just how many customers they get out of this effort, but their improved messaging should not go unnoticed.