
SpaceX and ULA win billions in Pentagon rocket contracts - PatrolX
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/07/spacex-and-ula-win-2022-pentagon-rocket-launch-contracts.html
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asimpletune
Did ULA actually do anything to deserve this or is this just to give a cut to
some of the more traditional private contractors?

~~~
adventured
139 successful launches with a 100% success rate.

Yeah, gee, if only they'd do something.

I'm all for competition bringing down ULA's prices, however to pretend they
haven't done anything to deserve contracts, is obscene.

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reddog
You beat me to it. “Move fast and break things” isn’t the ethos your looking
for when the payload cost billions.

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TomMarius
That phrase refers to development.

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jeffrallen
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)".

~~~
octodog
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?

~~~
mabbo
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.

[0][https://www.space.com/boeing-moon-lander-nasa-doug-
loverro-r...](https://www.space.com/boeing-moon-lander-nasa-doug-loverro-
resignation.html)

[1][https://www.space.com/spacex-boeing-commercial-crew-seat-
pri...](https://www.space.com/spacex-boeing-commercial-crew-seat-prices.html)

~~~
simonh
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.

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jeffrallen
I'm not interested in the long term. I want my tax-paying parents to get a
fair deal now. Government should work for the people, not for ULA.

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woodandsteel
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.

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drannex
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).

Vulcan is to be flown early next year.

~~~
valuearb
The New Shepherd uses the BE-3.

The BE-4 the Vulcan will use has never flown.

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.

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unixhero
SmarterEveryDay, United Launch Alliance factory visit,
[https://youtu.be/o0fG_lnVhHw](https://youtu.be/o0fG_lnVhHw)

Earlier ULA video by SmarterEveryDay,
[https://youtu.be/OdPoVi_h0r0](https://youtu.be/OdPoVi_h0r0)

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lalos
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.

~~~
kanox
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.

~~~
lalos
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.

~~~
valuearb
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.

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jondubois
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.

~~~
mabbo
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.

~~~
jondubois
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.

~~~
mabbo
But consider the good that _has_ come from space.

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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:International_Space_Station_experiments)).

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.

~~~
jondubois
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?

~~~
jdm2212
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.

