Once SpaceX has proven they can do safe crewed flights and Blue Origin goes beyond testing flights, why is there a reason to pay the huge ULA markup any more?
ULA, as well as Airbus, has a problem: they're constantly being meddled with by politicians without any idea what they're doing and decide stuff that's totally unreasonable from an economical point but helpful for their (or their party's) reelections. Airbus employs 130k people, Boeing 140k and Lockheed 100k, and in addition there are a lot of people in the supplier companies. That's a lot of voters, and the companies are often enough big employers on a regional/local level.
Which means: SpaceX and Blue Origin will conquer the entire commercial sector plus an enormous amount of US government work. EU-founded projects will (politically mandated) stick to Airbus, but the political inability of Airbus to innovate will lead everything else go to SpaceX/BO. And the taxpayer will have to "save" them... or have to deal with hundreds of thousands people out of jobs.
I don't think so. ULA was formed in 2006 [1]. Before that, the U.S. launch market was competitive within itself and with the Russians. The Falcon 9 first flew in 2015 (EDIT: "first flew commercially in 2013") [2], returning the American market to a competitive state. American aerospace engineers are used to working in a competitive culture. If ULA doesn't become competitive, either itself or by splitting, there are plenty of launch start-ups beyond SpaceX and Blue Origin hiring away that talent.
In contrast, the European market has no similar tradition of competition in launch services. The reaction to SpaceX isn't to consider a novel platform. It's to plod on with the old and raise the gates around European launch buyers.
Yep, exactly the same problem as IBM, Blackberry, and many other companies who were at the top and then either stopped innovating or got to big and slow.
Having the bigger companies fail in a respect is a good thing. Have those engineers go back into the free market. Have them create companies and make competition. Push technologies forward and pricing down.
Look at Rocket Lab and their Electron rocket. Pretty amazing if you ask me and didn't really cost that much.
Let the free market sort things out. It always does. Unless of course you start involving the government with their jobs program and you get an SLS rocket that costs $2b each and isn't reusable.
What we need are many more companies providing launch services. Lets get the cost down to $1k to send someone up. Lets get more companies building infrastructure in space, so we have 10, 20 or 50 space stations in LEO.
There's so much up for grabs, but it won't be available if we start protectionist policies.
Huh? Atlas I had failures in 1991, 1992, and 1993. Atlas G failed in 1984 and 1987.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_I
But I think your model is a bit of hyperbole. You’re downplaying the statistical model that goes with this. Launching a rocket is Russian roulette. The odds are quite different when you want to launch a rocket once versus a dozen times.
(1 - p)^n = the odds that I still have a rocket after n launches, where p is the odds of it blowing up on any given launch. The asymptote is at 0 and it gets there pretty fast.
The good news is that the cost benefit analysis has a similar problem.
Let’s say you want to reuse a $10M part once. Right now it costs you $20M for two flights. You create a $11M version that costs $1M to refurbish. That’s $12M for two flights or $6M per flight. You got a 40% cost improvement. So now you go for 3 flights. Now you have a $12M part that costs $1M to refurb. That’s $14M for three flights or $4.66M per flight.
From 1 to 2 you saved $4M per flight. From 2-3 you saved an additional $1.33M per flight. From 3 to 4 you’d save $0.66M per flight, by adding another $1M to your up front costs.
The bean counters are probably going to push back here. Opportunity costs you see. They’re going to demand you reduce costs, find revenue neutral ways to improve profits. For instance if you can cut 25% off the refurb costs that’s a better cost improvement than getting to 5 launches. While that makes getting to five more appealing, it also takes time. So you can imagine what the gap between five and six will be filled with. Cheaper rocket, lower refurb costs again.
If they have money to spend at this point they’ll give it to the lobbyists or marketing department. You aren’t the best investment they have anymore. Increased revenue is.
Airplanes (or "aeroplanes" on that side of the pond) have always been reusable, so Airbus was able to establish itself and build a stable business building them.
Rockets have always been non-reusable (until SpaceX), so ArianeGroup built a stable business around that assumption. Now they're being out-competed by a foreign company that has proven that assumption wrong, and they don't know what to do except demand more subsidies and a monopoly so they don't have to compete.