Pick up to 4 launch vehicles to compare side-by-side. State lives in the URL — share the link and the comparison loads exactly as you left it.
The global launch market reached $14.1 billion in 2024 — up 34% since 2021.
| Attribute | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Company | United Launch Alliance | Interstellar Technologies | Galactic Energy |
| Country | 🇺🇸 USA | 🇯🇵 Japan | 🇨🇳 China |
| Status | Retired | In Development | Active |
| Vehicle class | Heavy | Small | Small |
| Propellant | LH2 / LOX | Liquid biomethane (LBM) / LOX | Solid (stages 1–3) + hydrazine liquid upper stage |
| Reusable | No | No | No |
| Stages | 2 | 2 | 4 |
| First flight | 2004 – 2024 | 2027 | 2020 |
| Payload to LEO | 28,370 kgas of [1] ↑ Best | 250 kgas of [1]500 km SSO. No flight attempts as of this research — follows the company's successful suborbital MOMO sounding-rocket program. A larger orbital vehicle, DECA, was announced January 2023. | 400 kgas of [1]300 kg to SSO. |
| Payload to GTO | — | — | — |
| Height | 70.7 mas of [1] ↑ Best | — | 20 mas of [1] |
| Liftoff mass | 733 tas of [1] ↑ Best | — | 33 tas of [1] |
| Success rate | 93.75% (15/16 full success, 1 partial failure)as of [1] ↑ Best | — | 91.3% (21/23)as of [1] |
| Total flights | 16as of [1] | — | 23as of [1] ↑ Best |
| Cost / kg LEO | — | — | ~$4.5M per launchas of [1]Total launch price, not a per-kg figure. ↓ Cheapest |
| Summary | ULA's triple-common-booster-core heavy-lift launcher, retired 2024-04-09 after its final flight; superseded by Vulcan Centaur, which ULA states offers similar heavy-lift capability at lower cost. | A liquid-biomethane orbital smallsat launcher from Interstellar Technologies, Japan's most established private rocket startup by suborbital flight heritage, though not yet flown to orbit. | Galactic Energy's workhorse small-lift solid rocket — one of the most-flown Chinese commercial launchers — with a sea-launch variant (Ceres-1S, debuted Sep 2023) and a larger Ceres-2 in development. |
48 launch vehicles across 10 countries — active, retired, and in development — with primary-source citations from manufacturer user guides and agency press kits. Pure URL state: bookmark or share the link and the comparison reproduces exactly.