DOD Opens Up Launches To Orbital and SpaceX
Lockheed-Boeing Launch Monopoly to Be Ended by Pentagon, Business Week
“The U.S. Defense Department plans to open more than a dozen rocket launches to competition, moving to end a monopoly held by a Lockheed Martin Corp.-Boeing (BA) Co. joint venture. The Air Force is authorized to buy as many as 14 booster cores over the next five years from potential challengers such as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX and headed by billionaire Elon Musk, and Orbital Sciences Corp., Frank Kendall, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, wrote in a Nov. 27 memo obtained by Bloomberg News. A booster core is the main component of a rocket.”
SpaceX Bests Orbital Sciences In First OSP-3 Duels, Aviation Week
“Already, about $100 million has been obligated under a new Orbital/Suborbital Program (OSP)-3 contract for the missions. Another $162 million is expected to be set aside in the coming days, Pawlikowski says. SpaceX “was considered the best value to the government,” she tells Aviation Week.”
Odd that SpaceX still offers the Falcon-1 single engine lightweight booster on its web site, but has absolutely no launches of it scheduled on the extensive manifest…only the Falcon-9 and 9 Heavy. It seems to me the single engine Falcon-1 was a good fit and a good dollar deal on getting lightsats, TAC sats, and quicksats into low Earth orbit. it seems on the surface to be a good choice for some of these USAF or other DoD projects.
I’m guess some issue about access to or logisitics with doing any non-Military launches from the Marshall Islands may have given SpaceX reason to downplay the Falcon-1. Maybe the Pentagon wasn’t too keen on seeing SpaceX launch civilian birds for other countries or entities from ” their” military reservation in the Marshalls. Just a W.A. guess.
Dewdle:
Could it be that SpaceX has gone ‘black ops’ on the Falcon 1? Maybe they offered it up as an option to see what happened. As you say, it’s a handy resource to have around for a military. The Falcon 1 has proven itself in flight. If it had a reasonable storage life, it would be useful as a rapid response small satellite launcher (for whatever the military thought was ‘useful’ ;)).
tinker
Unlikely. The Falcon 1 is simply in limbo – pretty much a cancelled product. There is no pad for it anymore.
Black? I thought they were all for going green.
Dewdle,
If this was non-military, I would guess that it might be because launching multiple payloads on a single F9 would be cheaper than individual F1s. I don’t know if that concept would apply to DOD, though.
Steve
OSP-3 is simply the follow-on contract to the OSP and OSP-2 contracts that Orbital has had with the Air Force for a decade. This is the contract vehicle that allows the Air Force to buy Minotaur, Pegasus, and Taurus launch vehicles. This is not competition for EELV.
I would love to see the math on this matter of the 36 cores from ULA. In theory the near term AF budget for ULA would go up, so ULA can block buy from suppliers, and get a savings in that negotiation. Volume, certainty and all that. Then in years 3 to 5 or so, the budget would drop. The prices per launch would not vary as much, averaging out by the 5 year end to equal the provided budgets. Yet the other 14 would not be in this sort of math, being old style onsie twosie purchases, for that winner to figure out over their other business, amortizing and all that. So in theory then ULA at 36 cores gets 7.2 cores per year, which could be the same rate of launches seen to date. About a few Atlas and a few Deltas, and an occasional heavy w. 3 cores. Again, averaging to that number of cores per year. And in theory prices dont get out of hand from ULA.
Well, in theory…