The Titan family of the 1980s and 1990s was marred by its price in the eyes of commercial customers, who instead opted to use cheaper launch vehicles like Delta II and Ariane 4.

[7] SLC-41 was the site of the first-ever Atlas V launch on August 21, 2002, lifting Hot Bird 6, a Eutelsat geostationary communications spacecraft built around a Spacebus 3000B3 bus.

[11][12] Other notable payloads to be mentioned are various launches of the Boeing X-37B for the Air Force throughout the 2010s, and a couple of Cyngus flights to the International Space Station in 2015 and 2016 following the failure of Cygnus Orb 3.

Proposals turned into plans in 2014, following Boeing's winning of a contract as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program to launch astronauts to the ISS.

[a] During the late 2010s and the early 2020s, SLC-41 and SMARF (which was renamed to the Spaceflight Processing Operations Center in 2019) underwent minor modifications to support Vulcan Centaur, the successor to the Atlas V and Delta IV.

This was in part due to the Atlas V using the Russian-built RD-180 as its first stage engine, which drew concern among Congress following the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

As the Atlas V still had numerous pending launches (mainly for Starliner and Kuiper satellites as payloads), SLC-41's modifications were made to allow both rockets to take off from the pad, rather than a more traditional renovation like what was seen at Vandenberg's SLC-3E.

The first Vulcan launch to be made from the pad occurred on January 8, 2024, carrying Peregine Mission One to the Moon as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services.