United Launch Alliance (ULA) is the aerospace equivalent of a gated retirement community. Safe, quiet, and full of people who still think the Shuttle was “modern.” It was born in 2006 when Boeing and Lockheed smashed their flailing rocket shops together under government pressure, creating a monopoly that could charge the Pentagon whatever it wanted for Delta IV and Atlas V launches. For years the business model was simple: deliver late, charge high, and sleep well knowing no one else was cleared for national security payloads.

Then SpaceX showed up and wrecked the neighborhood. Suddenly launch prices collapsed, boosters started landing like magic tricks, and ULA was forced to explain why it was still charging half a billion dollars to fly expendable hardware. Its answer was Vulcan, a “new” rocket cobbled together from leftover Shuttle engines, Russian RD-180 replacements, and a prayer that Blue Origin could deliver BE-4 engines on time. Of course Blue Origin was late, which meant Vulcan slipped years past its original schedule. By the time it actually flew in 2024, SpaceX had already made reusability boring and was cranking out launches like a bus schedule.

ULA today has exactly one thing keeping it alive: Pentagon loyalty. National security customers don’t like betting everything on a single provider, so ULA gets contracts whether or not it’s competitive. That safety net is thin, though, because SpaceX is not just cleared for defense payloads, it’s also cheap and reliable. Every Vulcan launch is essentially a plea to stay relevant, and every contract award feels more like charity than necessity.

Financially, ULA is dead weight. Boeing and Lockheed have both hinted they’d like to unload it, preferably before the balance sheets get worse. There are always rumors about private equity swooping in, but no one seems eager to buy a launch company that can’t compete commercially and survives only on government goodwill. If Pentagon contracts start leaning heavier toward SpaceX, ULA has nothing left.

So ULA is not a rocket company in the modern sense. It is a legacy contractor living on nostalgia and classified payloads, a museum exhibit that occasionally lights itself on fire. The industry has moved on, but ULA can’t. It is the aerospace equivalent of VHS in a Netflix world, and everyone knows it except the customers still too nervous to cut the cord.