United Launch Alliance is cutting jobs again, Denver Business Journal
“United Launch Alliance is again cutting jobs as it seeks to become more price-competitive with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and other rocket companies. The Centennial-based rocketmaker, the largest space launch contractor to the federal government, is seeking voluntary departures to trim an unspecified number of positions. ULA said it isn’t specifying the number because it considers that competitively sensitive information. The company shed 350 jobs last year through a combination of voluntary buyouts and layoffs and said last summer more cuts would be coming this year.”
What Elon Musk stands to gain and lose with Trump, USA Today
“Musk has been blunt about wanting to send humans to Mars, joking that he’d even like to die there, “just not on impact.” But getting there is going to require a lot of capital. SpaceX is still a small player when it comes to securing lucrative government contracts from NASA and the Department of Defense, the majority of which still get handed to longtime commercial partners such as ULA, says former NASA administrator Lori Garver.”
If you don’t like Trump’s principles or policies, just wait a week.
Yet before week two arrives, aides have already painted themselves into a corner by justifying and attempting to lend plausibility to the same pronouncements of week one.
Back on topic, ULA has just over 3,000 employees and shrinking. SpaceX has nearly 5,000 and growing. So it’s not immediately clear that ULA can fire it’s way to competing with the price points of the SpaceX product line.
In other news, Sierra Nevada just rented some 100,000 square feet of additional space in Louisville, Colorado. The local paper reports that they will probably hiring 400 people this year, and the story implies that would be for work on Dream Chaser.
To be fair, SpaceX builds its own engines, and many other components “in house”. This is called vertical integration, where the manufacturer controls virtually all of the manufacturing of components that go into the final product.
ULA, on the other hand, relies on suppliers for several key components (like rocket engines), so you really can’t directly compare the numbers of employees at each company. For Vulcan, ULA is betting that Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine will meet expectations, because Aerojet Rocketdyne’s AR-1 engine will almost certainly cost much more.
Nobody gets it- least of all USA Today; at $500,000 per ticket, plus profits from the soon-to-be lion’s share of the launch market, Mr. Musk has built himself a colossus- a cash generating machine that will carry him to Mars, and if he is to be believed, beyond. He has the only credible plan out there and he is doing it without littering the solar system with single-use billion dollar hardware (I’m looking at you, Mars DRM. You too, Apollo).
I suspect that even if my own paltry analysis is incorrect Mr. Musk is hardly forging his Mars enterprise depending on the fickle finger of government contracts.
Not only the launch business, but it seems everything he is doing has an application for it on Mars. Electric vehicles, batteries, solar power … hell even the hyperloop could be used there.
P.S. .. the underground drilling machinery…
I did find a reference to a hyperloop on Mars, for its intended purpose: Surface transportation over few hundred kilometer distances (prehaps SpaceX was thinking of two separate colonies.) The point was that it would be easier to construct on Mars, since the outside air pressure is already low enough and no sealed tubes and pumps would be required.
exactly .. the vehicles seem to be the most important thing and how you do the mag track…
“He has the only credible plan out there and he is doing it without littering the solar system with single-use billion dollar hardware”
I wish more people realized this, so many people bash Elon Musk and Space-X at every opportunity, complaining about relatively short schedule slippages (in comparison to NASA), hand wringing and doom mongering about every little quite normal safety issue, tutting at what they cry are “cavalier attitudes” simply because Space-X has chosen to do something a bit differently to “the way it always has and always should be done”. What these people don’t seem to get is that if they want to see a new age of space exploration in their lifetime Space-X is realistically for the foreseeable future the only game in town. Nasa? they are so totally at the whim of politics that anything more than a flag an footprints mission costing 50+ billion in about 20 years time is next to impossible. Boeing / ULA? they are simply not interested unless someone else (NASA) pays them a fortune to do it. Blue origin? yes they are making progress but are still a long way behind and even then don’t seem to have any concrete plans.
So who is currently perfecting retro propulsive landings, developing a methalox engine, working on massive copv’s and at least has a viable plan how ever crazy it may seem to some, Oh yes, Space-X.
Spot on, with a small quibble: it’s NASA’s HSF efforts we are discussing. The science-y boys are doing quite well on very limited funding.
Mr. Musk runs his business exactly the same way that I run mine: every single action contributes to the goal (most of the time, anyway).
Totally agree, There is some great work going on at the science-y end of NASA especially in the low to mid budget areas, the problem I have is that as the financial level of the project increases so does the political maneuvering for a “piece of the pie”