I’m starting to wonder how long they’ll survive. With Blue Origin finally flying (if still at low rates) and other providers coming on line, maybe it doesn’t matter.
I’m starting to wonder how long they’ll survive. With Blue Origin finally flying (if still at low rates) and other providers coming on line, maybe it doesn’t matter.
All this time, through all of its difficulties, I’ve assumed that ULA was safe to survive through the early 2030’s, since it has such a big manifest (about 70 launches) for Vulcan on its books.
But this is starting to sound serious enough to put that in jeopardy. The Defense Department is a big chunk of that manifest.
SpaceX’s strategy to vertically integrate its space architectures to the maximum extent possible looks vindicated yet again.
One also cannot discount the risk that the other large chunk of that thus-far Vulcan manifest could go away. That would be the launches slated for Amazon Leo. Besides handing ULA a big chunk of the total Leo launch manifest, Amazon also kicked in much of the money it took to build out a second Vertical Assembly Facility at SLC-41 to allow a potential doubling of cadence. If ULA and NorGrum can’t get pending issues squared away fairly soon, Amazon may have no real choice but to acquire still more launches from SpaceX in addition to the three already flown and the 10 additional ones that were recently contracted for. That, even more than military launches switched to SpaceX – and perhaps to Blue Origin within a year – could spell an early end to ULA.
Everything we’ve come to expect from Boeing….and Lockmart isn’t looking too good either
6 GEM 63-XLs could be replaced by 15 SpaceX Merlin engines, arranged as a 5 foot thick, 71 foot tall hoop that surrounds the Vulcan’s core. The engines would be spaced about eight feet apart.
The question would be how you land it, and whether it would really be a Falcon 15 with a weird methalox second stage and cryogenic third stage, and how they could ever make money throwing away an RL-10 per mission.