SpaceX and ULA win billions in Pentagon rocket contracts

However, SpaceX insertion is good enough for nearly every mission and they can make up for upper stage efficiency with brute force via Falcon Heavy--at a similar or better price point.

They also have a few paperwork advantages. Their vehicles have nuclear ratings, though SpaceX can certainly get that any time they want now. And they have demonstrated high reliability, which is important for uninsured billion-dollar payloads. Though it's getting harder to argue against F9.

An of course, they're owned by two major defense contractors with plenty of political clout.

But: their main advantage now is that they exist and are in the US and The Customer wants to maintain multiple options. Once Blue Origin comes online ULA's going to lose that one too, and will have to either figure out a way to make Vulcan price competitive, go on a crash course to develop a new competitive rocket (for which they're already too late), or lean on their relationship advantages and existing contracts to hang on for a while until at some point reality finally overcomes politics.

There's a lot of moving parts but they're not moving in a direction favorable to ULA, and given how hamstrung they are by their ownership structure I'd lean towards that last one.

Paying billions extra for inferior hardware adds little redundant benefit.

SpaceX is a private company (regardless of how many gov $ it receives) and can’t simply be restructured like a government agency could if it got into serious enough trouble. (Legal, financial, managerial, market, etc.)

Since SpaceX can expose itself to potentially fatal risk (by definition), it is in the government’s national security interests to spread that risk among several companies, regardless of the price tag.

It may or may not actually be cheaper to pay both in the long run. On one hand theoretically if they were the only option in the world they could charge absurd amounts. On the other hand it seems they stand to make more in the coming years commoditizing launches to attract more overall customers/launches and charge them each millions than to charge a few customers billions. Also they'll never be the only one in the world but it is a risk they could end up the only commercial venture in the US capable of launching.

One option is medium cost with low risk of astronomical (pun intended) cost and the other a low cost with a medium risk of astronomical cost.

Rather than have Boeing endure the criminal and civil liability a joint venture with advantageous terms to Lockheed was decided on.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-probe-intensifi...

EDIT: Also another thing I thought of is that SpaceX may not be certified to launch nuclear payloads (given their infrequency it probably doesn't make sense for them to bother).

Not true. It has the highest capacity of any operational rocket.

Finally there are some mission profiles even Falcon Heavy isn’t ideal for due to its RP1 fuelled upper stage. There are some missions where the extra Specific Impulse from a Hydrologist upper stage makes a difference.

So yes in the longer term many of these issues might be resolvable, but not all and this contract is for specific envisioned missions on a schedule and with known requirements, so nobody is making up numbers here. If it’s 60/40 there will be reasons for that.

It worked out so well (read: sarcasm) that DoD created a program to pay two defense contractors to create essentially-new expendable rockets. Which were hideously expensive, but still less expensive than Shuttle and previous expendable rockets, so this was considered a win. Those two rocket programs were later more-or-less forcibly extracted from their parent companies to become... ULA.

There was a point in the early Space Age where government employees designed rockets: Army Ballistic Missile Agency and Naval Research Lab and such. Basically never were they built in house; even the earliest rockets were actually built by airplane manufacturers. It didn't take long for design to move to private firms, with government specification, insight, and funding. Like pretty much all defense technology, rocket development and manufacture in the US is today all done by private firms. The government often owns the designs, but all the skill and know-how is in the private sector and they can easily make close derivatives on their own or for other customers, if they are allowed and want to do so.

(NASA's SLS is the major departure from this, as the first rocket NASA has ever designed in house--though still built by Boeing and ATK and friends. It's a bunch of Shuttle leftovers that somehow has still cost tens of billions of dollars and counting and is some 5 years behind schedule.)

The point of all this is: the USG isn't handing over the keys to the kingdom of spaceflight to private companies today. They did that in the 1950s and/or never had them in the first place. There's nothing different today except a project and contract structure that better aligns cost incentives, creates competition, and encourages these companies to create a market outside the government.

NASA is a research and exploration organization. It can buy launches for far less than it would cost NASA to build them. Those savings mean more probes, more manned missions, more science.

The real solution is to have a half dozen or more companies competing in various segments of the launch business, leading to faster technical advancement and lowering costs. And we are getting close to that today. SpaceX, ULA, Electron, Orbital ATK on line now, with Blue Origin and another half dozen on the way.

And this has led to the greatest burst of innovation and economic improvements the launch business has seen since the 1960s. A Falcon 9 can lift almost as much payload as the Shuttle, at a cost forty times lower. We have the first reusable first stages landing themselves, rocket engines being cheaply mass produced on assembly lines, the first operational full flow rocket engine, the first satellite constellations bringing internet access everywhere in the world.

In testing right now is the first truly reusable launch system, which if successful will cut the cost of space access by another ten times, and launch the largest payloads in history.

It will also be used to make in space refueling commonplace, if it succeed in that it lowers the cost of access to the moon, Mars, and other deep space destinations by at least ten times more.

GPS was a military project. Now we use it for everything from finding grandma's house to locating lost hikers.

The tech behind spy satellites is now used to monitor farming fields, increasing crop yields and reducing food costs. The same tech is used in telescopes like Hubble, teaching us so much about the universe and how nature works.

Most of the science on the ISS is impossible to do on Earth. We're learning a lot about human health especially (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:International_Space_S...).

And it's not like the money gets burned or sent into space with the satellites. It's spent here on earth. A $1B contract with SpaceX doesn't just go into Elon's pocket and then he magics up a rocket. SpaceX employs thousands of people.

And space is a tiny fraction of the spending of all governments on the planet. Cut the military budget of the US by 10% and you could feed every hungry child, have a proper health care system, pay to reform the police system. Cut the budget spent on space, you wouldn't put a dent in those problems and you'd lose out on all the benefits we get.