Alabama rocket builder United Launch Alliance (ULA) this week announced it recently honored three suppliers with a 2020 Small Business Excellence award for their support of the Vulcan Centaur program.

The Vulcan Centaur is ULA’s next-generation rocket that will provide higher performance and greater affordability while continuing to deliver reliability and precision. This rocket — built at ULA’s world-class facility in Decatur — will transform the future of space launch and will meet the important demands of the United States Space Force and U.S. national security satellite launches.

“ULA places a strong emphasis on the value and contribution of small business,” stated Tory Bruno, ULA’s president and CEO.

One of the small businesses to win the prestigious award was M&J, a custom fabricator located in Decatur.

M&J continues to be very responsive and flexible to ULA’s Vulcan development schedule and prioritizes their work based on ULA’s assigned priorities, per the launch service provider. Even with their recent move to a larger facility to help avoid any capacity restraints that would negatively impact ULA, they were still able to meet ULA’s schedule. The program management that M&J provides to ULA is second to none, even taking last-minute calls to talk strategy and any feedback that is needed, per a release from ULA.

“Small businesses are the engine of our nation’s economy and ULA is proud to recognize these suppliers who have demonstrated outstanding effort this year,” added Bruno.

With more than a century of combined heritage, ULA is the nation’s most experienced and reliable launch service provider. ULA has now launched 143 times with 100% mission success.

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Sean Ross is the editor of Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on Twitter @sean_yhn