Atlas V Launches More Amazon Leos with Only Six Starliner Flights Left on the Books

United Launch Alliance sent another batch of Amazon Leo satellites into orbit today. Except for six rockets under contract to Boeing for Starliner missions, it was the last launch of the venerable Atlas V with its Russian RD-180 engines. When ULA will launch next is up in the air. No Starliner dates are set as Boeing and NASA continue to investigate what went wrong with the 2024 Crew Flight Test. ULA is replacing Atlas V with Vulcan, but Vulcan launches are on hold following an anomaly earlier this year.

Atlas V sent 29 Amazon Leo satellite internet broadband constellation satellites into orbit at 12:30 am ET today from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

LIFTOFF of the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with a star‑spangled start to the Amazon Leo 8 mission as America’s 250th Birthday approaches! pic.twitter.com/JUTHoXnaQN

— ULA (@ulalaunch) July 2, 2026

Amazon LEO, formerly Project Kuiper, is a competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink and other satellite broadband constellations, with a total of 3,236 satellites planned.  SpaceX launches its own Starlink satellites, but Amazon had to contract with launch service providers to get half of the satellites into orbit by July 30, 2026 and all of them by July 30, 2029 to meet Federal Communications Commission requirements. In 2022, Amazon ordered launches from ULA for both Atlas V and Vulcan, as well as from Blue Origin and Europe’s Arianespace, and later bought some from SpaceX as well.

The FCC recently granted Amazon a conditional waiver to this month’s deadline to launch half the constellation. The company would have needed 1,616 satellites in orbit, but today’s launch brings the total only to 396.

ULA launched 224, or about 60 percent, of those. The next ULA launch for Amazon Leo will be on a Vulcan, but the launch date is uncertain as the company investigates what went wrong on a February launch for the U.S. Space Force. For the second time in just four Vulcan launches, one of the Solid Rocket Boosters attached to the side of Vulcan’s core stage malfunctioned. In both cases, the rocket’s core stage and Centaur V upper stage compensated for the SRB underperformance and put the payloads into the correct orbit nonetheless, but ULA and Northrop Grumman, which provides the SRBs, need to determine and fix the problem before the next launch.

Vulcan. Supporting U.S. national security. Watch the United Launch Alliance team in action as we successfully deliver USSF-87 direct to geosynchronous orbit. pic.twitter.com/GIOi9cMnAN

— ULA (@ulalaunch) February 17, 2026

ULA told SpacePolicyOnline.com they are preparing the next Vulcan right now and gearing up for a wet dress rehearsal to deliver the next set of Amazon Leo satellites, but a return-to-launch date hasn’t been set.

Today’s launch was the 110th for Atlas V, which has a 100 percent mission success rate since the first in 2002.  Atlas V was designed with Russian RD-180 engines following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. After Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, however, Congress prohibited Russian engines from being used to launch U.S. national security satellites, a core business for ULA.  The company began development of Vulcan with engines built by Blue Origin and began to phase out Atlas V for national security missions. Civil and commercial launches are not affected by the congressional ban.

ULA has been winding down the Atlas V fleet and only six remain in inventory today. All are contracted to Boeing for launches of their Starliner spacecraft, but when they’ll fly is a question mark. Three Starliner test flights — the first two without a crew, the third with — had mixed results, all unrelated to the Atlas V.  The most recent in June 2024 took NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station, but returned to Earth without them after NASA concluded Starliner wasn’t safe enough to bring them home because of propulsion system failures.

Butch and Suni ended up staying on the ISS much longer than expected, returning on a SpaceX Crew Dragon in March 2025. Almost a year later, NASA declared it a Type A Mishap, the most serious classification. NASA’s Program Investigation Team,  Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, and Office of Inspector General all identified a wide range of questionable technical, contractual, and management decisions.

The investigation and solving the technical problems is taking quite some time. NASA originally purchased six Starliner flights to deliver crews to the ISS under a services agreement with Boeing. NASA subsequently decided the first of those, Starliner-1, will be cargo-only and reduced the number of flights from six to four. Boeing hasn’t announced plans for the other two that remain under contract with ULA.