The government also wants to maintain redundant capabilities, and ULA, which has an incredible success rate and is an incredibly reliable company, is a pretty damn good option for one of the two.
Like most Scott Manley videos, it's a great video, but it's out of date.
That video basically mentions three things: fairing size, vertical integration and the fact that SpaceX's rockets in reusable mode don't lift as much as competitors. This contract pays SpaceX to fix the first two issues and the third can be solved by using the SpaceX rocket in expendable mode.
ULA maintains a couple of technological advantages; they have some unique insertion steering and their hydrogen upper stage is particularly well-suited for Earth-escape missions.
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.
And of course even reusable rockets are eventually EOL, so that rocket in ‘expendable mode’ might have actually flown half a dozen missions beforehand.
That's only one dimension of redundancy. The other one is control/ownership. High cadence won't save you if they suffer a problem that shuts down their entire fleet for a year, or if through a hyperloop accident Gwynne Shotwell gets replaced by her counterpart from the mirror universe, and decides to stop servicing US government unless she gets to be the empress.
Point being - and tangentially, it's somewhat of a blind spot in tech industry - besides scaling, you also really need ownership/control redundancy. Legal single points of failure are still single points of failure.
I was watching a congressional committee discussion on this subject a year or two ago - consensus seemed to be that the gov should always have at least two companies available to provide launch services. Hedges their bets a bit and it nurtures the industry.
The DoDs primary concern is access to launch capability. Not price. SpaceX achieving a market monopoly would only be a concern to the DoD in that it would potentially limit the number of companies capable of providing launch services.
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.
> 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.)
Technically it can, its just that the US government doesnt like to.
Its more about the somewhat likely probability that a single launch provider will have a failure that necessitates a lengthy investigation during which they are grounded. Its nice in that situation to have another launch provider who can pick up essential missions.
That's certainly a risk, but "we're the only launch provider in the US, and we just raised prices from $250M to $2.5B, and any potential competition will take 5-10 years to get up to capability" is a big risk too. The DOD isn't gonna launch GPS satellites on a Progress.
ULA claims their Vulcan rocket will be more competitive price wise while their reliably record is impeccable. Considering the payloads cost a billion, the Pentagon likely doesn't mind paying a bit of a premium for reliability.
I think it'd be more apt to say paying inflated prices for a secondary mitigates finical risk than guarantees less spent over time.
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.
The government forced them to form ULA after Boeing was found to have thousands of pages of Lockheed proprietary info. Boeing had been stripped of a $1B launch award and was barred from bidding pending the investigation.
Rather than have Boeing endure the criminal and civil liability a joint venture with advantageous terms to Lockheed was decided on.
My recollection is that the FTC did investigate, but that it was decided that the EELV/ULA situation was preferable to maintain assured access to multiple launch vehicles (Delta+Atlas) and stop Boeing and LM from running each other into the ground. (I think there was serious industrial espionage too).
Yes, they put in a winning bid on the contract. I imagine some of the things that put them ahead of the competition would be-
Vertical integration. I don't think oMeGa or BO are capable of doing this. Neither is SpaceX. Horizontal integration complicates certain missions
More complicated orbits. ULA has demonstrated in the past that they can inject direct to GEO. I don't think any of the other bidders have, and I'm not sure if they claimed they'll be capable of doing so.
Precision. Depending on who you ask, ULA is the best when it comes to actually hitting their desired orbits. This can add life to the payload. For a billion dollar satellite, an extra year of fuel can totally justify $20 million more in launch costs (or whatever the difference happens to be)
Other than SpaceX (since F9 and F9H already exist) I think they're the closest to actually building the rockets that they put in their bid. The second stage draws heavily from existing designs.
Would you mind sharing concrete numbers? I can't imagine that Vulcan is going to cost that much more than an Atlas V. Even if SpaceX reduces their prices by 80% compared to what they charged during EELV, a $100 million difference seems unlikely to me.
There is little evidence the Vulkan will cost less than the Atlas V, since it’s a higher capacity launch system with a highly capable but expensive second stage. It’s going to be about the same as an Atlas V & Falcon Heavy, but much cheaper than a Delta IV Heavy. It’s payload to LEO are about 20% higher than a Falcon 9 and about half that of a Falcon Heavy, but it’s payload to GTO/GEO are close to the Falcon Heavy.
A commercial contract Atlas V is roughly $50M more than a Falcon 9, but government contracts have a lot of more expensive handling/launch requirements that can easily double the cost. It’s likely the difference is not $100M more, but it’s still going to be easy more than $20M.
There are differences in the ULA and SpaceX launch options. There is far more to spacelaunch than cost per kilo to orbit.
One of the big issues is that SpaceX doesn't do vertical payload integration. It's upper stage options are also very different than those of ULA. For many sats that isn't an issue, for some military sats it is a very big deal. When the payload is worth many times as much as the rocket, with incalculable trickledown impacts should its launch not go perfectly, your choice of rocket has to tick absolutely every box.
With rockets like the Atlas 5 (flown by ULA), the rocket is assembled vertically in a tall "hanger", and is then rolled out to the launch pad, remaining in the vertical position.
The Falcon 9 is assembled rolled out to the pad horizontally, then it raised into the vertical position in preparation for launch.
It can be more complicated to design satellites (esp satellites that have large optics in them) to deal with gravity in two different orientations.
Complicated and less weight-efficient. Designing a structure for gravity/g/force in one axis is wasteful enough. That strength is useless once in space. Horizontal integration means the structure must be strong in two axis: double waste. It might not matter when you are launching cubesats, but in a spy satellite the size/weight of a bus that extra reinforcement means sacrifices in many other areas.
But it's more economical, money-wise, as Russian launchers history shows. In general, American rocket school tends to have better mass efficiency but less economical efficiency that Russian rocket school.
"When he wants more thrust, Ivan doesn't look for a fancy propellant with a higher specific impulse. He just builds himself a bigger rocket. Maybe he's got something there." - J. Clark, Ignition! https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...
Of course the point was that one can use simple and crude solutions, or effective and sophisticated ones. Another example would be that in Russian rocket engines pumps tend to be put on the same axis as the turbine, so frequencies of turbine and pumps are the same and some of them can be non-optimal. In American tradition one uses gears, which makes both turbine and pumps (more) optimal, for the cost of gear mechanism. Practice shows that both approaches can work, but, just as with vertical assembly, which requires a tall building or a vertical transportation of a rocket, some ways look simpler than others. Simpler not necessarily better - but in rocket assembly it's probably cheaper to do it horizontally.
It's a bit more than cubesats. Nearly every satellite is or can be fine with horizontal integration. Witness every SpaceX and Russian payload ever launched.
Only exotic (presumably optical) sats from three-letter agencies really demand it, and even then we don't know if they really need it or would rather just spend the money to make it the launcher's problem rather than do a redesign or evaluation of their system.
SpaceX undercut the market price for space launches by nearly 70% in 2010, and has averaged a launch every two and a half weeks for the last four years.
Usually by truck for at least part of the journey (airplanes, boats, and trains are also commonly used). They are carried in custom built frames that hold them in the correct orientation. The frame is then surrounded by a sealed box that keeps the satellite clean, and with the appropriate climate controls (temperature, humidity, etc).
Here's a good overview of the process (though in this case it's a satellite that can safely be transported in multiple orientations): https://qz.com/1346279/big-plane/
It just seems to me that it would need to be horizontal, and likely encounter greater stresses during transport than during a tightly controlled horizontal assembly process.
ULA basically built a portable clean room around the tip of the vertical rocket, to put the payload on top. Because the rover has to be free of earth organisms.
Ya, but they haven't done it yet. When you are organizing launch contracts for billion-dollar spy satellites you only ever go with people who have done things a few times before.
The Delta IV and Atlas V were developed twenty years ago. Given turnover and the new management structure, lots of those people are gone or not in the same roles.
ULA has designed and is building the Vulkan rocket now. Presumably they have some staff that were involved with the Atlas V and Delta IV back when they were with their parent companies.
That was 20 years ago, they’ve had lots of turnover since. So while they clearly retain some expertise, most appears to be in launch operations, not launch system design. Which is one reason they had to farm out engine design to Blue Origin.
Treating the ULA bid as if it were lower risk than SpaceX appears to be contrary to the facts. The Falcon 9 has been flying for a decade, and has a very good safety record.
The Vulkan is a paper rocket that is years from actual service using an unproven engine, being designed by an effectively new team.
100% success rate is a lot easier if you inherit two working and tested rockets at birth of the company though. Both Atlas V and Delta IV had failures before ULA was formed. It'll be interesting to see if Vulcan can also achieve 100% success rate, or whether they'll have the same toothing issues SpaceX and others have had.
I wonder to what degree you need to hedge against Elon being a crazy person? 3% chance he one day decides he’s out? Wonder how quickly and easily they can eminent-domain the company in the interests of national security if Musk bugs out
I don't pay that much attention, but I get the impression that the established parts of SpaceX are run by Gwynne Shotwell, and Musk focuses on new tech.
From what I've heard from SpaceX employees, Musk is extremely committed to SpaceX in general, and to putting people on the surface of Mars in particular. It's most definitely not a joke for him and I don't see him "bugging out" of something that to a large extent gives his life a higher purpose.
Mars 2020 required vertical integration of the payload which SpaceX still doesn't do.
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).
SpaceX don’t have vertical integration just now, but they will soon due to this contract.
Nuclear payload certs sounds like paperwork after they’ve put already put humans up
I think you're right that there's more to this than a little paperwork, but my (novice) understanding is that nuclear payloads are designed to withstand explosive aborts on their own.
Given the design constraints in a rocket I don't know how much you could really do to "harden" it otherwise.
They still aren't certified to do nuclear payloads like RTGs, and when the Mars 2020 contract went out they were only certified to launch the smaller NASA missions
In this case "vertical integration" means that the rocket is standing upright while you are bolting the payload on to it.
The alternative is "horizontal integration" where you bolt the payload on the rocket while the rocket is laying on its side. You transport the rocket to the launch pad on it's side, and only there do you tip the rocket+payload together to be upright.
This sounds like a very small detail, but many payloads turns out to be highly optimized to only receive forces in one direction, and their structure is not certified to be cantilevered in such a way to "hang" from the tip of the rocket body.
It appears that it means the assembly of the rocket—whether it is assembled horizontally or vertically. SpaceX rockets and payload are apparently assembled horizontally and then lifted upright.
Larger fairing is easy, and if launch reliability is truly important you don’t pick a paper rocket (Vulkan) being built by two companies that have never designed an orbital launch system before (ULA and BO).
It's not far off. Vandy's built for Falcon Heavy, and was at one time slated to host its debut flight. That got changed to the Cape during development, so it may at this point be a few hardware revisions behind, but that's not a big deal, and can certainly be done in the timeframe of a FH order.
ULA was created to make a semi-monopoly to suck at the teats of the US governments pork farm. They’ve never created a new rocket or launch system, or advanced space exploration in any meaningful way. Instead they just kept flying the same old tired designs until they became utterly obsolete.
Fortunately another company came along and dramatically undercut their monopolistic pricing while providing the most valuable technological innovations space launch has seen since the 1960s. And now ULA is irrelevant and on a long term path to dissolution. Bailing them out with this contract is a near criminal act by the Air Force that shows nothing but favoritism.
It’s not bragworthy if you achieve zero forward progress in creating new capabilities. The Atlas, Titan and Delta series of rockets were great 50 years ago, but rapidly aging twenty years ago and so expensive they were holding back progress in space.
It’s like Henry Ford focusing on making the original Model T higher quality, but not cheaper. It would be a great accomplishment if he doubled the number of miles between servicing and halved the rate at which key components broke. But if he’s not also reducing its costs dramatically, it robs the world of the worst affordable car for the masses, a far higher achievement.
Any win for ULA is a loss for taxpayers... Their entire business model is "take what you can get from a stupid/credulous customer (the federal government and it's pork barreling politicians)".
Until a third competitor is flying reliably it remains prudent to overpay for ULA. Even commercial satellite operators don't sole-source to the cheapest option because they want to keep other operators available. Space launch is a brittle business since a single failure will put a launcher out of commission for a significant fraction of a year.
I don't really know anything about ULA or the space industry in general so I find this to be a particularly unhelpful comment. According to you, what makes their business model like this? Could you explain why this is fundamentally different from any other contractor?
The general answer is that you have up and coming companies like SpaceX (and maybe soon Blue Origin) who are pushing hard to reduce costs and be competitive, yet ULA, Boeing, Lockheed (ULA is Boeing and Lockheed actually) keep winning contracts where they offer less, but charge more.
And people are left wondering why? And then people begin to notice that those companies have lots of friends working at the Pentagon, NASA, etc. On the latest bids for the moon landers, a high ranking NASA official had to step down because it appears he leaked information about the bids directly to Boeing when it was clear they were going to lose this big contract[0].
Just look at the Commercial Crew program, where private companies bring astronauts to the ISS for NASA, Boeing is being paid 60% more per seat[1]. You would expect that means they're of higher quality- yet here we are in August 2020 and so far they've failed their no-humans-test-flight, while SpaceX has sent and returned two astronauts already.
The real question in my mind is why this latest contract with the Pentagon went 60% ULA, 40% SpaceX when it could just have easily done the 60-40 split the other way, saving a lot of taxpayer money while maintaining identical redundancy.
As has been pointed out in many posts to this thread, long before your post, there are still capabilities ULA offers that SpaceX doesn’t. That includes vertical integration, which SpaceX will develop but currently doesn’t have, and various fairing and launch site options. SpaceX has yet to achieve direct to GTO, and ULA have a better record of accurate insertion into the desired trajectory, that can be a big deal. ULA also has launch site options SpaceX doesn’t have, specifically while F9 can launch from Vandenburg, Heavy cant yet and the time and cost fir that might nit make economic sense
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.
ULA is a leech created to attach to pork. It’s current rockets were designed by parent companies 20-50 years ago. ULA just kept making the same rockets, at higher pricing without the competition the parent companies provided, and without improving them in any significant way.
They got caught with their pants down by SpaceX, and now their existing rockets are technologically and economically obsolete. So instead of shutting them down, the Air Force gave them first position as a lifeline, even though they have to build their first new rocket ever, using an unproven engine, that’s unlikely to be cost competitive and won’t be reliable for years.
That’s the truth, Vertical assembly and ULAs reliability on their old rockets is just red herrings. Vulkan is no more worthy of a government contract than New Glenn or any other paper rocket from a first time launch system design team.
Part of the problem is that before SpaceX, the industry was used to "cost-plus pricing" in government contracts - i.e. "we'll pay you whatever it costs to make, plus some extra for you" - which strongly incentivizes the contractors to inflate the production costs (or, charitably assuming everyone is playing fair and 100% honest, there's still very little incentive to innovate in order to cut the costs down). ULA is still held down by that legacy.
Also, note that ULA is a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing; the underlying political issues form an infinite, money-sucking fractal. It's always been like that - space industry grew out from government military programs; in fact, SpaceX is representing the new wave of private, commercial interests with no military legacy.
Obviously SpaceX 100%, and offer to divert 40% of it to one of the other bidders when their unproven launch systems actual pass rigorous testing and actually launch something into orbit.
When the ULA Vulcan was first announced, the plan was the engines, which are 90% of the cost of the first stage, would be recoverable and reusable. The idea was the engine section would detach from the rest of the rocket, fall a ways and then a parachute would open, and finally it would be caught mid-air by a helicopter. The idea was this would help it compete on price with the Falcon 9.
However, according to the Wikipedia article on Vulcan, this has not been funded, and so the rocket is going to be fully disposable.
The Vulcan rocket has transitioned to using Blue Origins thrusters instead of inhouse development.
The first stage will be reusable (The Blue Shepherd launch vehicle from Blue Origin has now flown over 12 times, as of December using their BE-4 thrusters).
ULA has never built a new launch system. Based on their track record early next year is optimistic.
ULA has no real plans for re-use, they’ve never even funded a test program for the SMART plan, and Blue Origin has never demonstrated propulsive landing capabilities for an orbital class booster.
The first stage is potentially reusable, but according to the Wikipedia article this has not been funded, so when it starts flying next year it will be expended. The thrusters are reusable, but you need a whole lot more than that. Maybe some time in the future it will be funded, or maybe not.
It's interesting to see how NASA has been slowly being privatized via these contracts. People used to be rooting for NASA and now they are rooting for a company that at the end of the day, will do as they please with the technology developed. Americans seem to prefer small government and 'offshore' everything to for-profit companies. In the future, what stops an American company from one day abandoning the USA to another country and leaving the USA without the infrastructure to do space travel anymore? (not familiar if there's regulation in place to stop this?) Or maybe this would just cause the price to rise in the USA for the same services.
This comment is as misinformed as it gets. This is a DoD contract, NASA is not involved in any capacity. Also NASA never made their own rockets, the fed always decided what rocket NASA will use and awarded contracts to companies on each Senator's state( usually Alabama). That includes the Saturn V, the Space Shuttle etc. NASA provides the requirements and the contractor makes it.
These contracts were on a cost plus basis, meaning the contractor had every reason to delay and ramp up costs. The reason people are cheering SpaceX is because they are promoting cheap rockets and competing on fixed price contracts which have much healthier incentives.
This is also a fixed price contract so it should come as no surprise that SpaceX is competitive here.
Also ITAR is the main legal reason that prevents companies from leaving the USA. Even rocket companies from other allied countries are trying to come to the USA instead of leave it.
That's one thing I don't get. There is a lot of celebration of the shiny new totally private space programs and all, but wasn't the majority of "heavy lifting" always done by private companies like Lockheed and Boeing? Isn't it mostly business as usual, just with a couple of new players in mostly the same game?
The game isn't mostly the same, look at the commercial crew program, Starliner failed in its first demo mission, now Boeing needs to pay for another demo-1 mission from their own pocket (they won't get any extra money for the second demo-1 mission); in the past NASA would have paid for another demo-1 mission.
in other words, they simply got their shit together (making the contractor liable for the actual outcome), plus a couple of new competitors, otherwise things are still ordered by, and directed by the same agencies, no?
Before Congress said let’s buy a suit for a wedding. There was only really one tailor.
Tailor says how much have you got.
Congress says $1 billion but that’s all I’ve got so not a dollar more.
Tailor says ‘sure I can make that work’...
Fast forward, suit is half way done, wedding is tomorrow, tailor says ‘It’s gonna cost your another billion’ or you get nothing. Congress pays and hopes the wife won’t notice. This happens over and over again.
Fast forward to 2020. Finally there’s more than one tailor. Several in fact. The suits are already made and bought off the rack and simply adjusted to fit.
Now congress gets to go shopping and has a range of suits to choose from. Original tailor is in deep shit.
Instead is spending billions on a suit and waiting forever, they pop down to ZOZO and pick one out and pay $100m. What a bargain I’ll take ten.
New tailors in this case - SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Blue Origin in this case.
No, they no longer micro manage the process and tell the contractor how to design the rocket or what processes to use. They provide overall specifications and let the contractor decide how to design the rocket. These days the various agencies just verify / do due diligence rather than design and project management.
Well, yes. The one big change is moving from cost+ contracts to fixed price ones.
Note that doing this is much harder than it sounds, because NASA does not get to decide what kinds of contracts they sign. This is decided by congress, who is still saddling NASA with billion+ dollar cost+ contracts on the SLS rocket.
There are no private space programs, there are private rockets developed using a combination of private funds and fixed cost contracts which means they are cheap. Old space rockets were developed only for gov contracts and they gouged the price as much as possible. SpaceX is efficient with it's rocket development.
Not sure how people are misreading the comment, but in an alternate world NASA would still have the capability to sell this same service to DoD. Since that's not the case, this void has been filled by private companies. Given that info, re-read my comment.
There was such a world. Travel back to 1990, and NASA is selling launch services to DoD via Shuttle. In fact, every other domestic launcher had been shut down to reduce competition on NASA.
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.
This is a defense procurement program, NASA is not directly involved.
Claims that NASA is being "privatized" are a bit silly, it has relied on private sector suppliers for it's entire history. The shift from operating it's own rockets (like the Shuttle) is a very good thing and lowers cost through increased competition.
It would be better for NASA to spend money on research (like space probes) instead of operating the actual rockets.
But, to be fair to the OP, NASA has launched classified payloads on the Space Shuttle, and perhaps other rockets. Perhaps the OP is wishing things would go the other way, with all government launches having NASA act as the prime contractor.
Not sure how people are misreading the comment, but in an alternate world NASA would still have the capability to sell this same service to DoD. Since that's not the case, this void has been filled by private companies. Given that info, re-read my comment.
NASA isn’t a private company. It’s not selling launches to anyone. It’s also not a good launch system designer, the Space Shuttle may have been the worst operational launch system design in the history of space flight.
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.
There's nothing wrong with the idea of NASA launching or even owning their own rocket per se.
The problem is always with their bosses, so they always relied on the private sector supplier and contractors instead of using them only when it makes sense.
This is explicitly NASA's strategy, and it is the correct one. NASA wants to be pushing the bleeding edge of possibility in space, and prefers to contract out the "everyday" stuff or orbital flight, in order focus on deep space missions.
The fact that SpaceX is so reliable so quickly is a testament to how great a bet NASA made. The OCO failures come to mind as something that, hopefully, will never happen with SpaceX as a partner. [1]
> It's interesting to see how NASA has been slowly being privatized via these contracts.
It was always my understanding that NASA is a public research institution whose role is to also provide incentives to jump-start areas of the space-based or space-oriented economy. Therefore, one of its main missions is to provide incentives for private companies to conduct research in that domain, such as allowing research programs to be awarded to private companies or consortia including private companies.
If you look at the Saturn V, Rocketdyne built both the F1 and J2 engines. IBM and Raytheon built the guidance computers. For the Space Shuttle, Rocketdyne built the RS-25, Thikol built the SRBs, and IBM built the AP-101S computer. I'm too lazy to see if NASA built the Saturn V fuel tanks or the Space Shuttle external tank, etc. themselves, but it has been a long time (if ever) since NASA could independently launch spacecraft into orbit.
Sure, NASA used to act as the prime contractor, and now they're outsourcing that role, but the prime contracting capability isn't among the critical capabilities for space flight.
Shuttle tank and S-I body were built at NASA Michoud, but by contractors (Boeing and Martin, respectively.) Boeing today is building the SLS first stage there, as a variant of the Shuttle ET.
Nasa did that simply because they could not get things done, is not the fault of nasa admins nor engeniers, but the corruption of their legacy contractors and congress pushing to do spreed across the country all the projects in order to give jobs in each state, leading to a massive ineficiency that simply was unsustainable.
Privately companies already demostrated they can do much more for less.
NASA has always used private firms to design and build practically everything. SpaceX will be constrained by the same things as all the other private aerospace and defense contractors: export control restrictions, domestic production laws, and most importantly the loss--and transition to a domestic rival--of a huge (even primary) customer if that customer should be displeased with their choices.
If SpaceX (or Blue Origin or whatnot) manage to transcend the need for US government money, well, good for them. They just created a huge new swath of economic activity, which is exactly the goal of NASA in supporting commercial services.
You're confusing NASA launches with the DOD. Totally different thing. Go look at how many things the NRO and its predecessor agencies have put into space with no involvement of NASA over the last 40 years. And all the GPS launches... And things like the geostationary WGS and AEHF satellites. I could write a much, much longer list but that's just a notable few.
In the future, what stops an American company from one day abandoning the USA to another country and leaving the USA without the infrastructure to do space travel anymore?
I have recently come to the conclusion that benevolent billionaires operating in a democratic and capitalist society are best way to allocate resources.
Hurray, more government money being laundered to pay master Elon and his gang.
Let's keep increasing taxes and keep printing more fiat money and give it to Elon Musk so that we can all be good slaves, giving him and his gang tangible goods and services in exchange for what is left of the magic green paper which the government gave to him for free; much of which he burned off into the void of space. Long live master Elon.
SpaceX charges less than ULA for identical services.
If you're arguing that the Pentagon shouldn't launch satellites because it's expensive, that's a reasonable argument, sure. But if you're arguing that the Pentagon should pick the more expensive contractor because they aren't owned by a celebrity you don't like, that's kind of silly.
I'm saying don't send tax payer dollars to be burned into the void of space when that same money could be used to improve the quality of people's lives here on earth. For sure it's better to waste it efficiently than inefficiently. But even better to not waste it at all.
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.
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.
I don't buy into the job creation dogma. The government could pay thousands of people to push a boulder up a mountain... Then these boulder pushers can use their salaries to pay for food, healthcare and accommodation... Are the cooks, doctors and builders on the other side of the deal getting a good deal here? No. the boulder pushers got something for nothing and so did the guy who manages the boulder pushers. Society is worse off because the boulder pushers could have used the same skills to harvest food, for example.
GPS and the Internet were both invented by military, so I get that point... But that was a different time, there were different kinds of people in charge and people had more principles. When was the last innovation from the military which served the public interest?
The defense sector is a big source of funding for basic scientific research. That stuff takes a while to pay off -- decades, usually. GPS and the Internet are old because of that; when they were more recent investments, they weren't useful (yet).
One of the more recent massive success stories is KeyHole, which became Google Maps. It was originally funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm.
