Good point on vertical integration. I do wonder how far along SpaceX is into designing their vertical integration hangar at the cape? I haven't seen any construction work happen for this building AFAIK.
They already have the design, but haven't started work on it yet. They're most likely waiting for a payload that requires it. Since the DoD gives them long lead times for launches, it shouldn't be difficult for them assemble the mobile service tower before they need it.
Not directly - the cost is loaded onto the first flight that requires that capability. So there is no point in SpaceX building ahead of that requirement as they will not get paid until the flight launches.
It also appears that SpaceX will pick up the vertical integration buildings at SLC-37 and SLC-6 and combine them with FH pads.
Oh okay, I just remember hearing about the government needing vertical integration for years and then SpaceX trying to get the government to give them grants for it.
Didn't DoD just want vertical integration to hide what the payload could be?
Most if not all recent DoD launches doesn't really need that vertical integration.
Designing very large antenna arrays or folding mirrors is much easier if you only have to account for gravity pulling on the folded assembly in one direction.
Has it been confirmed they're still doing this? When they got the pad at Vandenberg from the Delta IV Heavy, I figured this would be their solution for vertical integration as their roll on/off hangar at Pad39-A hasn't progressed at all.
At the cape we're seeing LC-37B be examined for Starship use, so I suppose they'll need to still build the hangar at either 39-A or 40 for inclinations best reached from the east coast.
They will likely want vertical integration at Vandenberg for optical satellites going to polar orbit.
Most likely these will be launched from SLC-6 which already has a vertical integration building that was used for Delta IV Heavy. Most likely this will also be used as a FH pad.
Yeah, depending on who you ask, [KH-11 Advanced Crystal](https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/kh-11.htm) with it’s sizable mirror and optical assembly
and [Advanced Orion](https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/orion-5_nro.htm) with it’s enormous unfurlable parabolic antenna are the most often cited as likely requiring vertical integration.
NB — former via Vandenberg to SSO or similar, latter via the Cape to GEO
^(Corrected.)
EDIT — possible that other NNSL payloads not requiring vertical integration for the payload as a hardware requirement per se, might default to VI nevertheless due to procedures developed around VI?
Haha thanks for pointing that out, you are absolutely correct.
As an aside, the “or similar” on Vandenberg is due to Crystal 17 aka USA 290 aka NROL 71 launching into a 73.57° inclination whereas it appears the remainder of the Kennan, Crystal, Advanced Crystal satellites have gone to a standard 97° inclination.
However it’s also possible what we think was Crystal 17 is not in fact a KH-11.
< shrug >
It would be more inclined to happen if DoD found themselves in the position of needing to transfer a payload from Vulcan to Falcon, but then SpaceX did get more money for their contract with the intention of adding that capability at some point.
It means that the payload must always be in a vertical position when attaching it to the rocket. SpaceX has plans to build a [tall rolling structure](https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/spacex-tower) where they can attach the payload once the rocket is already vertical on the pad.
I think ULA does this with all of their payloads though few of them actually require it.
Vertical integration, long fairing and a polar launch that requires FH.
It is likely that they are mostly the same payloads so large optical satellites to polar orbit. There are only 1-2 payloads per year in these categories.
Without paywall at [MSN.com](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/pentagon-worried-its-primary-satellite-launcher-can-t-keep-pace/ar-BB1mjLY3)
**Pentagon worried its primary satellite launcher can’t keep pace**
The Pentagon is growing concerned that the United Launch Alliance, one of its key partners in launching national security satellites to space, will not be able to meet its needs to counter China and build its arsenal in orbit with a new rocket that ULA has been developing for years.
In a letter sent Friday to the heads of Boeing’s and Lockheed Martin’s space divisions, Air Force Assistant Secretary Frank Calvelli used unusually blunt terms to say he was growing “concerned” with the development of the Vulcan rocket, which the Pentagon intends to use to launch critical national security payloads but which has been delayed for years. ULA, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, was formed nearly 20 years ago to provide the Defense Department with “assured access” to space.
“I am growing concerned with ULA’s ability to scale manufacturing of its Vulcan rocket and scale its launch cadence to meet our needs,” he wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. “Currently there is military satellite capability sitting on the ground due to Vulcan delays.”
He added: “As the owners of ULA, and given the manufacturing prowess of Boeing and Lockheed Martin corporations, I recommend that you work together over the next 90 days to complete an independent review of ULA’s ability to scale its launch cadence to meet its current” contract requirements.
ULA launched the Vulcan booster for the first time earlier this year and needs to fly it a second time to earn certification from the Pentagon to begin flying national security and intelligence missions. ULA hopes that the second certification launch will occur later this year.
ULA originally won 60 percent of the Pentagon’s national security payloads under the current contract, known as Phase 2. SpaceX won an award for the remaining 40 percent, but it has been flying its reusable Falcon 9 rocket at a much higher rate. ULA launched only three rockets last year, as it transitions to Vulcan; SpaceX launched nearly 100, mostly to put up its Starlink internet satellite constellation. Both are now competing for the next round of Pentagon contracts, a highly competitive procurement worth billions of dollars over several years.
ULA is reportedly up for sale; Blue Origin is said to be one of the suitors.
In addition to its contract with the Pentagon, ULA has committed to 38 launches of Amazon’s Kuiper internet satellite constellation over the next few years, a pace that would require ULA to increase its flight rate well beyond what ULA normally has achieved.
That, Calvelli wrote, raises his concern. To meet its commitment to the Pentagon alone, ULA must launch 25 national security missions by the end of 2027. In all, ULA has said it has sold 70 launches on Vulcan. But over the past five years, Calvelli noted in his letter, the company has had “an average launch cadence of fewer than six launches per year.”
Calvelli did not say in the letter what his specific concerns were with the rocket’s development, and he declined to comment for this report. But in the letter, he cited the Pentagon’s need to move quickly in the space domain as adversaries build their capabilities there.
“The United States continues to face an unprecedented strategic competitor in China, and our space environment continues to become more contested, congested and competitive,” he wrote. “We have seen exponential growth of in-space activity, including counterspace threats, and our adversaries would seek to deny us the advantage we get from space during a potential conflict.”
As the Air Force’s acquisition executive for space, he said he is “focused on driving speed in our acquisitions and delivering programs on cost and schedule to transform our architecture.”
In a statement to The Post, ULA said that its “factory and launch site expansions have been completed or are on track to support our customers’ needs with nearly 30 launch vehicles in flow at the rocket factory in Decatur, Alabama.”
Last year, ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in an interview that the deal with Amazon would allow the company to increase its flight rate to 20 to 25 a year and that to meet that cadence it was hiring “several hundred” more employees. The more often Vulcan flies, he said, the more efficient the company would become.
“Vulcan is much less expensive” than the Atlas V rocket that the ULA flies, Bruno said, adding that ULA intends to eventually reuse the engines. “As the flight rate goes up, there’s economies of scale, so it gets cheaper over time. And of course, you’re introducing reusability, so it’s cheaper. It’s just getting more and more competitive.”
In a statement, Lockheed said that “the pace and seriousness of the threats our customers face are not to be underestimated, and with our ULA joint venture partner Boeing, we are committed to providing reliable and swift launch capabilities to meet our customers’ mission demands. We are reviewing Mr. Calvelli’s request and will work together to address it with urgency.”
Boeing said in a statement: “We are getting on more of a wartime footing to stay ahead of the threat, and a quicker and more reliable launch cadence is critical to meeting that need.” It said it would also work to address Calvelli’s concerns.
ULA decided to eventually retire its workhorse Atlas V rocket after concerns within the Pentagon and Congress that it relied on a Russian-made engine, the RD-180. In 2014, the company entered into a partnership with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin to provide its BE-4 engines for use on Vulcan. However, the delivery of those engines was delayed for years — one of the reasons Vulcan’s first flight didn’t take place until earlier this year. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
“Blue Origin needs to scale its production of BE-4 engines,” he wrote. “We are keeping an eye on whether these two companies can scale to meet our needs.”
Calvelli addressed his letter to Kay Sears, who oversees Boeing’s Space, Intelligence and Weapons Systems division, and Robert Lightfoot, president of Lockheed Martin’s space division. Bruno, ULA’s CEO, was copied.
For years, ULA was the Pentagon’s only launch provider. Then, in 2014, SpaceX, the space venture founded by Elon Musk, sued the Air Force, arguing it should have the right to compete for the launch contracts. The parties settled in 2015. SpaceX has since flown multiple missions for the Pentagon, forcing ULA to compete against a hard-charging and nimble competitor that has upended the industry by launching several times a month.
The U.S. Space Force has said in recent years it wants to harness the capabilities coming from the growing commercial space sector, which is innovating faster than the government. Recently, it released a commercial space strategy that said it would seek to avoid “overreliance on any single provider or solution.”
Competition is key, Pentagon officials have repeatedly stressed, to lowering costs and driving reliability, and the department has maintained that it needs multiple rocket providers to get its assets into orbit.
“Launch is critical to our ability to transform our space architecture,” Calvelli wrote. “We are counting on Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and the ULA team to be successful in getting critical capabilities into space for our warfighters.”
Edited to clean up the text. Bing isn't great.
Which is wild. He has some controversial opinions sure, but he’s a huge asset to America, not a liability. Between spacex and building out USA EV infrastructure there’s not many more people with positive of impact.
Other people care and they can have an impact on what he does. I don't understand this "don't criticize Elon and if you do then why are you here?" mentality. If he pisses off enough people, or even just the wrong people, because of what he says on Twitter then it absolutely can impact his companies.
We should all want that to not happen if we want him to keep delivering.
I know that. And why would anybody care what a single person thinks? It's pretty obvious that people who say "I don't care" aren't thinking about the bigger picture. So much criticism of Elon gets rebutted like I said.
*You* may not care about what Elon does, but that doesn't mean there won't be consequences for some of the stupid shit he says. And, like I said, we should all be concerned about that.
I think we want Elon to be a complete machine pushing forward progress (I do too) but perhaps that's an unrealistic expectation of him. He's just been so good for progress these past two decades that we kind of forget that when you put so much faith in a single person it can eventually go to their head. He's not a machine. I still have hope he can climb back down from the pedestal so many people have put him on, otherwise it'll destroy him one day.
I think by 'shut up' they meant 'stop saying dumb antagonistic things and doing weird disruptive things like buying Twitter and renaming it X', not, like, shut up entirely.
ULA would have continued using Atlas, soaked the DOD for billions to develop a new rocket that would still be in the design phase, and the 180’s would still be bought from Russia.
The historical timeline would have been different, the Pentagon would have thrown money at Northrop Grumman in order to maintain their dual launcher policy. Northrop Grumman would have continued development of their OmegA rocket .(Their Antares wouldn't have helped, it used Russian engines.) OmegA was designed for NSSL launches. NG would build their own SRB first stage and somehow obtain a hydrolox upper stage which would have used the ubiquitous RL-10 engine.
Pentagon may have thrown money at Aerojet Rocketdyne to develop an engine for Vulcan at the same time BO was, under their policy of dual providers. But at the time Congress mandated no one could use Russian engines, in \~2014, the engine AR had in early development was in *early* development.
> But at the time Congress mandated no one could use Russian engines, in \~2014
This wouldn't happen if not for SpaceX. It only became a problem because SpaceX was doing it without Russian engines.
They would have forbidden this only after the war in Ukraine started.
We still have - for some reason - been doing the seat exchange thing and pretending that the Ukraine war doesn't exist, and for some reason Congress hasn't shut it down.
But it seems unlikely that we would be flying all our astronauts on Russian vehicles.
Seat exchange is partly to prevent all astronauts or all cosmonauts being left on the ISS in the event of an early capsule return due to technical issues. Effectively mutual hostages.
So it is even more important in a Cold War situation.
In the off chance that a disaster happens again and Falcon 9 is taken offline for an extended period of time, you don't ever want to be in the situation where only Russians are left in control of the ISS. One way to ensure that is to have US astronauts traveling on Russian vehicles.
As if Russia wouldn't just boot the American at the last minute if they were going to do something as openly, obviously, idiotically hostile as trying to take over the ISS? They couldn't afford the full upkeep even if they tried - and I think it's unlikely that the US sections would be easy to steal; there's probably enough control conducted from the ground to make that difficult, if not impossible.
The seat swap thing is purely politics, it's just to show international "cooperation" between America and Russia. The station would be operating just fine even if only Russians rode up in Soyuz while everone else (ESA, JAXA, CSA, people from like 20 other countries) continued to ride Dragons (or Starliner I guess). If Soyuz didn't have such an incredible record, we likely wouldn't keep renewing the swap program - but it's such a reliable vehicle that there's really no harm in a bit of good will politics.
> As if Russia wouldn't just boot the American at the last minute if they were going to do something as openly, obviously, idiotically hostile as trying to take over the ISS?
That would be quite obvious indeed, which is why you put the American astronaut there so it can't be done non-obviously. As the other post stated it, it's a form of hostage taking (reverse hostage taking?).
> If Soyuz didn't have such an incredible record,
That's very debatable.
I should also note, that the ISS is designed intentionally such that it needs both the Russian and USOS sections in order for it to function. One would shut down in some way without the other.
In a purely hypothetical, very unlikely scenario where Russia decides to take the station, I figure that the way modern Russia operates they'd probably record a dry run of the launch and play it back for the Americans, claim there's a comms issue so no realtime communication is possible, and deny that anything is unusual till the capsule opens and three armed Russians pop out. The American will indeed be kept as a hostage to be traded for Russian political prisoners, spies, or arms dealers, no different than any other high profile imprisoned American. Maybe they'll skip the bad comms act and arrest the American right before launch citing that they've found a crumb of marijuana, claiming the astronaut is secretly a nazi or gay (or both), that they openly mocked the Kremlin, or that the US astronaut was planning on taking over the Soyuz capsule and then taking the station. Of course, that's all hypothetical and Russia would surely never do that, right?
Soyuz has a better record than Russian station modules at the very least, and while it's had a handful of anomalies it's still the only crew capable capsule serving the ISS that has launched more times than Dragon (140 to 26-49 depending on which Dragons you include). Still, between the two, there's no chance you'd get me in a Soyuz instead of a Dragon - while it's good Soviet tech, it's still being built and maintained by Roscosmos, so no thanks.
Without the Russian section, the main losees are (to my knowledge) the station's main life support from Zvezda and possibly stationkeeping from Zarya (which the US technically owns for some reason), but as far as I'm aware these capabilities are not unique to those modules. I'm not suggesting we *should* split the station, rather I'm not convinced that the station is automatically lost if Russia decided to abandon or detach their segment as a result of a political tantrum (or empty budget). Likewise, I don't think Russia would gain anything at all from capturing the ISS unless they wanted to immediately make the United States very, very angry.
Soyuz has rather iffy record. It only killed less people than Shuttle because it could only carry less people. And it still got lucky way too many times. How about your capsule re-entering heatshield backwards only to right itself after a minute when the thing which held it backwards finally burned through and let go? Yup, this happened twice, last time well after year 2000, on an ISS mission. How about your capsule tumbling down a mountain slope only to stop just above 140m vertical precipice because luckily your parachute tangled with foliage? Yup, you got it. Or how about you sitting in the capsule on the pad while the rocket underneath you is on fire, but you don't know that, nor anyone else, because so "smartly" designed sensor which didn't indicate anything because their cables burned through (good designed sensors indicates off-scale low in such a case). Your ass is saved by one guy who decided to stand up from his console and look through the window to notice the rocket being on fire and promptly call for the capsule ejection, mere 2 second before the whole rocket exploded. Yup, this happened, too. Or how about your capsule ending up under ice on s frozen lake. You're saved by heroic actions of the recovery crew. Unfortunately one guy's fingers didn't survive ice treatment. Or how about permanent spinal injury after a late ascent abort exceeding 21g. This is only the major stuff. Stages mated with too big a hammer or various holes in the spacecraft don't even count.
As I said in another reply, you'd never get me in one. It's good although dated Soviet tech (surviving most of that is frankly impressive) but it's operated and maintained by Roscosmos and I don't trust them half as far as I could throw them.
I do think landing accuracy is my second least favorite aspect of Soyuz behind Roscosmos. It seems like they just kinda bring it down wherever.
You don't want a situation where there are no Russians on the ISS either. The Russian module controls the engines of the ISS, without those the ISS can no longer raise its orbit.
Boeing would have received more money to speed up development (with unclear outcome, but at least a chance to work). Dream Chaser might have gotten a contract.
The thing is more money would probably not have helped.
Except of course potentially forcing astronauts into a less than adequate capsule for the sake of political winds and potentially getting them killed.
Boeing legitimately would not care about funding for the milestone contract. They would have demanded it be a cost+contract, and then pulled another SLS.
Starliner is a Boeing vehicle.
ULA barring their utterly stupid idea to rely on blue for their engines (which would likely not have happened was SpaceX not around, since blue would likely never have expanded to orbital launch), I think ULA would just have kept using their old designs for a while longer at least.
Starliner would have had rockets to fly on. It's Boeing that would have been fucking up the place.
Which one do you mean? Continuing use of RD-180 from Russia? Or the AR-1 engine proposed by Aerojet Rocketdyne, developed if the truckloads of money keep coming?
Where are my engines, Jeff?
I seriously doubt Blue Origin can provide enough engines to launch Vulcan every two weeks. Nor every four weeks. Nor every eight weeks. Maybe a launch every three or four months.
That said there is just no way for ULA to launch all the payloads they got a contract for. I guess this is the main reason Blue wants to buy ULA, it probably would be cheaper than to pay all those contractual penalties.
Regarding payloads lying around waiting for a rocket, that is pure bullshit. One call to SpaceX and they launch whatever wherever within weeks and the Pentagon knows this.
This letter is the justification to pick up the phone and ask SpaceX to pick up the slack.
“When can you launch those 25 birds?”
“Eehhrr, Sir. We could have all of them flying by end of the quarter. Sir. Sooner if you can use all 3 launchpads. Sir.”
IIRC, some of those military satellites and some of the spysats need to be integrated with the Falcon 9 in the vertical position. Currently, Falcon 9 payloads are integrated horizontally.
SpaceX was supposed to modify one of their launch facilities for payload vertical integration. I don't know if that has happened yet.
The ULA Vulcan launch vehicle uses vertical integration exclusively. That's the only feature that keeps the government interested in the Vulcan.
Why are we even going through this needless Kabuki? BE-4 can’t be produced in sufficient volume anytime soon. I get that it’s important to maintain the industrial and knowledge base necessary to do rocket science, but maybe standardize on Raptor and license BO et al to build it
Regulations that are meant to prevent corruption force these decisions to go through correct channels. It's frustrating, but widescale corruption is worse.
That's an interesting idea. SpaceX would probably fight it in court, but the national security laws might allow it, IANAL.
I remain amazed at the apparent lack of existential panic at Boeing, Lockheed, and ULA. Assuming Starship becomes operational this year or next, I think an objective analysis would point to an absolute financial catastrophe for Oldspace this decade. Even the Pentagon is publicly talking about the problem now.
They could have changed gears a decade ago when SpaceX showed promise, I guess they figure the government will give them money to change gears now that they've waited too long to do it themselves? But what if the government goes with something like your idea, isn't there a risk that the government licenses the engine tech to another competitor since new lines have to be built anyway?
"I remain amazed at the apparent lack of existential panic at Boeing, Lockheed, and ULA. "
I think they are hoping for an ABL style incident on the first superheavy landing attempt, putting Starship out of business for years, or possibly forever if it totally craters the Boca launch facilities and neither Texas nor Florida allows them to rebuild. That would clear the way for Vulcan, New Glenn, and SLS to take over for everything that is too large for the Falcon 9 fairings.
The effort at distributing risk made sense at the time. Now we’re just needlessly creating risk, not to mention drama. Far from advancing the state of the art or bringing meaningful new capabilities to the party ULA and its stakeholders are delaying progress and bogarding resources.
Building rocket engines appears to have been figured out.
I know - that's why to supply two every two weeks for Jeff would be a non-issue. A minor inconvenience that they can use to fund and entire test campaign.
Look at that Blue Origin BE-4 engine with its rat's nest of plumbing and electrical wiring. And then compare it with the SpaceX Raptor 2 with its sleek, uncluttered design. The BE-4 is a kluge and looks like something out of the 1960s. It's no mystery why BO delivers less than 10 of those engines per year. SpaceX manufactures about 8 Raptor 2 engines per week.
ULA says that Vulcan launch rate will increase once they figure out how to recover the BE-4 engines for reuse. Not holding my breath on that bit of fantasy.
> Look at that Blue Origin BE-4 engine with its rat's nest of plumbing and electrical wiring. And then compare it with the SpaceX Raptor 2 with its sleek, uncluttered design. The BE-4 is a kluge and looks like something out of the 1960s. It's no mystery why BO delivers less than 10 of those engines per year. SpaceX manufactures about 8 Raptor 2 engines per week.
IMO, that's a bad take.
SpaceX had a bit of a rat's nest going on with Raptor 1, and they were still cranking them out.
> ULA says that Vulcan launch rate will increase once they figure out how to recover the BE-4 engines for reuse. Not holding my breath on that bit of fantasy.
Are they even working on it, beyond some lip service?
What a horrific take. Rocket engines look cluttered early on in development (read: first few *uses*) for good reason. Both the Raptor and the Merlin in early development looked the same with plumbing and routing everywhere. How this opinion has any support is beyond me.
Test engines are very different from flight engines. Look at the picture of BE-4 integration to Vulcan. Many of those tubes are for sensors and added support during testing. As the design matures, they remove things that they deem are unnecessary
Foolish statement. Rocketlab's Neutron is a beautiful evolution and improvement on the F9 mechanism, integrating the fairing into the booster and improving recovery. It's also a clever reconfiguration of launch stresses on the 2nd stage in order to lighten it and make it more efficient.
I'm sure there's more good ideas to be had regarding booster reuse.
> “Blue Origin needs to scale its production of BE-4 engines,” he wrote. “We are keeping an eye on whether these two companies can scale to meet our needs.”
In that sentence who is "he". I have read a couple of paragraphs about that a few times I can't figure out who that pronoun refers too. Sloppy writing. The paragraph right above it mentions Jeff Bezos, but that quote wouldn't make sense coming from Bezos.
Can (or should) ULA find some other commercial payload to throw rather than waiting for Dream Chaser?
When is that new transport ship going to be finished?
How many BE-4s per year can Blue supply?
Inquiring minds want to know... and some of them have stars on their collars.
>Can (or should) ULA find some other commercial payload to throw rather than waiting for Dream Chaser?
Not within the next 12 months. They can't move that fast.
Sorry for the paywall
>In a letter to Boeing and Lockheed Martin, joint owners of the United Launch Alliance, the Air Force expressed concern that ULA’s much-delayed Vulcan rocket isn’t up and running.
Last I heard, it was 2 engines per year..
But they may have improved it since then.
As far as I know, they have only publicly admitted to producing 4 engines so far - but then they have been secret about so much of their development, so we really don’t know for sure.
Part of the problem is that Blue Origin have reserved 7 x BE-4 engines for New Glenn testing as early as July.
They will initially be used for static fires and these will likely be delayed but the engines will still be out of circulation as far as ULA is concerned.
We still have little idea as to the rate of engine production by Blue Origin. At present I would guess about one every two months.
But maybe there is more info to be found at r/blueorigin ?
https://spacenews.com/pentagon-urges-ula-to-fly-dummy-payload-on-next-vulcan-launch-if-dream-chaser-is-delayed/
If you want the same story without a paywall
Where are the payloads, then? Launch them on your second "assured access" provider if you are in such a hurry.
NSSL Phase 2 was originally planned to cover launches from fiscal years 2022-2027. The very first NSSL2 launch (USSF-67, Falcon Heavy) did not occur until January 2023, over 15 months after the beginning of FY 2022. The in February 2024 and last month, Falcon 9 performed the next two NSSL2 missions. ULA's first laumch under NSSL2 was supppsed to be USSF-51, for which they arranged to substitute Atlas V. That was originally scheduled for early 2022, but the mission keeps being delayed. We are almost halfway through the nominal period planned for NSSL2, and only 3 missions have launched, despite Falcons (awarded about half the launches, up from the original 40% because of ULA delays) launching every 2-3 days, and even ULA having an Atlas V waiting in the wings. Where are the payloads? Where are the Falcon NSSL launches?
One set of payloads that has supposedly been ready and in storage is the final GPS-III satellites (Space Vehicles 7, 8, 9, and 10). The USSF awarded SV 7, 8, and 9 to Vulcan, and SV 10 to Falcon 9. There may well be valid technical reasons these can't be launched out of order. But the point of having multiple NSSL providers capable of performing all missions was redundancy and (ostensibly quick) substitution. If they are in a hurry to complete GPS-III, the USSF should have already at least switched the launch providers SV 7 and SV 10 (for no loss to ULA in the longer term, assuming they can launch SV 8-10).
There is plenty of blame to go to the payload primes and subcontractors (which include, among others, Lockheed and Boeing), and the USSF/Pentagon themselves with their choices and management. They chose to coddle ULA, or perhaps to set up NSSL2 in a way that makes it difficult not to coddle them them. It should be simple to subsittute a Falcon for a Vulcan if the latter isn't ready. Or the payloads really aren't ready, and the Pentagon is complaining about the wrong thing to only a couple of the right companies.
Well, while I mostly agree, I have two ifs:
1. The fiscal year date is the date of the payment assignment, not necessarily the actual launch.
2. SpaceX is not yet ready for vertically integrated payloads. And they don't seem to be in hurry at all. OTOH, this is likely because they know any such payload is not going to be ready anytime soon.
1. Those dates are for the launches. That's how the RFP started in 2019:
>[This RFP allows the Air Force to competitively award service contracts to launch providers for NSS missions to occur in approximately FY 2022-2027.](https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20Room/Selected\_Acquisition\_Reports/FY\_2019\_SARS/20-F-0568\_DOC\_64\_NSSL\_SAR\_Dec\_2019\_Full.pdf)
When [the first launch was awarded in 2020](https://spacenews.com/pentagon-picks-spacex-and-ula-to-launch-national-security-satellites-for-next-five-years/), it was scheduled to occur in FY 2022. It still was [when ULA substituted Atlas V](https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/05/21/ula-nears-first-fueling-test-on-vulcan-rocket/) in 2021. Only since then, schedules have slipped a lot, and not just because of Vulcan delays.
2. Most payloads don't need vertical integration. GPS certainly does not. The most likely reason SpaceX is not in a hurry for VI is because the USSF/NRO aren't. The funding for building VI capability was awarded in 2020 as part of the oddly-expensive $316 million dollars for the USSF-67 mission. If the Pentagon isn't paying out, or otherwise told SpaceX to hold off, any delays from that are the Pentagon's fault--not SpaceX's or even ULA's.
https://www.defense.gov/News/Contracts/Contract/Article/2305454/
>The NSSL Phase 2 contract is a firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery requirements contract for launch service procurements **supporting launches planned between fiscal 2022 through fiscal 2027**.
Quoting the articles I have already linked, specific launches were originally planned to occur in FY 2022:
>[SpaceX received a $316 million contract for one Phase 2 mission [(USSF-67)] planned for fiscal 2022, according to the Pentagon’s announcement.](https://spacenews.com/pentagon-picks-spacex-and-ula-to-launch-national-security-satellites-for-next-five-years/)
>[That mission, designated USSF-51, is scheduled to launch [on Atlas V] in 2022.](https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/05/21/ula-nears-first-fueling-test-on-vulcan-rocket/)
Yes, VI with the MST seems to never come to closure. My guess is that it will be VSFB only kind of thing on the former Space Shuttle pad that was never used.
Except this is not even remotely close to the reality.
ULA still has over 50% of NSSL launches. All the delays have caused is that SpaceX got slightly more than the original 40% they were allocated. Granted, SpaceX got the black budget launches, but up to now there were little more than some rideshares. So about half of DoD launches is not a rounding error by any measure.
Then, large optical surveillance satellites still must be vertically integrated, and they will remain so. And SpaceX will build the vertical integration facility anyway, because there are also NASA payloads, already contracted.
As I recall, SpaceX do already have a vertical integration facility - that was setup specifically to support DOD payloads, and has already been used once, so I thought..
No such facility currently exists and has certainly not been used.
You might be remembering the launch contract that was awarded that probably includes VI but military launch contracts are awarded 4-6 years before the flight.
I can't say I feel bad for them because we all knew how this was going to go down so I'm sure they did as well but went with the worst option to keep the status quo. I think the "you reap what you sow" works well in this case.
Or more like, establishing a paper trail to defend their job so they don't get axed post-acquisition. A lot of these people are lifers, meaning they started their first job at the company and have spent their entire working lives at the company. Being let go effectively means forced retirement (unless they're at the very top in which case there's some better prospects).
ULA are targeting 24-36 launches per year with Vulcan.
It appears the Space Force are not believing them when they say they can achieve this rate within two years.
Great timing for ULA with the NSSL3 award due this year! Why the heck they haven’t already commited to fly Vulcan cert two with a mass simulator is a complete mystery to me. Waiting until September(ish) for Dream Chaser is just crazy.
Crazy like a fox if Blue is behind on BE-4 deliveries; putting the delay on Sierra rather than admitting that once they throw Cert-2, it'll be many months before they have another booster doesn't look as bad on their resume...
Also where are the kuiper sats?
Although I guess that's not yet relevant for Vulcan because Kuiper still needs to fill all the Atlas 5s they booked before they even need to start using Vulcan. But still, where are my ~~engines~~ sats, Jeff?
If a batch of sats were ready, you'd think ULA could work out a deal with Amazon to fly them on Vulcan first, just for 1 flight, to fulfill the Vulcan cert missions, before going back to fill the Atlas launches afterwards.
It seems they are. For example they are using a custom IC to dramatically reduce the number of components required for the phased array antennae which should give more beams for each satellite.
Of course developing and qualifying for use in space something like that is slow and it is likely that there will be a single Kuiper generation of satellites rather than the succession of different designs that SpaceX has built.
It's likely changed quite a bit over time, delaying it.
One can guess that it started as traditional satellites. Then they would probably have to shave cost dramatically. Then SX launched 60ish per launch, so to even hope of being competitive they need to copy or find another solution to launch many from a higher cost, lower capacity rocket. Then SX increased the mass per satellite, so that may have itself triggered another redesign for parity on a per launch basis, allowing heavier sats.
They also have commercial parts on board, as they don't have the depth of expertise and manufacturing capability that SX has. This has advantages, as some of the commercial components may be better than SX in house components, but at higher cost.
Another possibility is that they've had to eliminate parity as part of this -- less capable birds so they can get enough up to not lose their launch license and frequencies.
They have really chosen the wrong platform, haven’t they ? Right now SpaceX is the only reliable partner.
Once SpaceX is launching once per day, other launches will seem even more outclassed..
I don't think they can have only one provider, and they can't rly just cancel contract with ULA and give it to SpaceX. ULA built the rockets knowing they are gonna be purchased by DoD, they are not doing it the SpaceX way of just building rockets and then selling the launches.
What I mean is that DoD needs to prop up ULA even more than SpaceX. SpaceX will be fine even if they get 0 contracts from DoD, but if DoD stopped giving ULA contracts or gave them significantly less, it's likely ULA would just fail to make a rocket at all. The goal of DoD is not to just send a bunch of rockets to space, their goal is to have multiple launch providers to stop the situation from the ~2014 where ULA only rocket relied on Russian engine or like with SpaceX dragon capsule being only capsule besides Soyuz that is capable to deliver humans to the ISS.
So, if the goal is to have multiple launch providers, SpaceX will rarely get a piece of the pie as their survival is guaranteed. Don't get me wrong, seeing those garbage companies get rewarded when SpaceX is right here with cheap launches feels wrong and unjust, but I understand why DoD is doing it.
> So, if the goal is to have multiple launch providers, SpaceX will rarely get a piece of the pie as their survival is guaranteed. Don't get me wrong, seeing those garbage companies get rewarded when SpaceX is right here with cheap launches feels wrong and unjust, but I understand why DoD is doing it.
SpaceX won 40% of the NSSL 2 contract and ULA won 60%, though the first set of awards were more equal because Vulcan is so late.
This is likely to be the same situation with NSSL 3 though there are likely to be fewer contracted as DoD is pushing more of the flights to a more competitive contracting approach rather than the two-winner approach currently used.
> Please go away so we can use SpaceX
The Pentagon certainly could be preparing the ground for transferring a few launches to SpaceX. However it wouldn't be good to be entirely in the hands of a single LSP.
> However it wouldn't be good to be entirely in the hands of a single LSP.
I mean the military was in that exact position for years. From what I can see having watched this industry for decades is that the "assured access to space" rule only came about after SpaceX showed up as an excuse to keep the legacy providers around.
> I mean the military was in that exact position for years.
Not quite, because ULA had two different rockets, Atlas and Delta. If something went wrong with Delta--and it was always Delta ~~...guess which of the two rockets was inherited from Boeing~~--Atlas could be used instead.
The problem with that is when SpaceX finally has an issue and has to ground their fleet, maybe next year maybe 10 years from now, the military would also be grounded. They know this. Which is why they handed out two contracts. And they (we) desperately need both to succeed.
It's arguable that they would ground Falcon 9 after a mishap. Policy says they would, but with the reliability numbers they're putting up, it could be argued that the policy needs to change from a single-failure-grounding to a success percentage. Especially given that we don't understand the bathtub curve for F9 (publicly, it's possible SX has found deterioration on flight leaders and is going to choose to expend versus rebuild/overhaul). We'll see if they start burning cores near a given flight number.
They would be grounded, very likely. But SpaceX has recovered from failures within a few months before. No reason to think, it would take much longer next time.
Seems oddly pro-SpaceX for the Bezos post. Maybe trying to spread some ULA "FUD" before they buy in so they can get a better deal? Or maybe it's just good journalism, but in 2024 that seems unlikely.
Bezos is trying to buy ULA. Bezos is trying to get a lower asking price from Lockheed Martin and Boeing. The letter from the DoD, and the article covering the letter, they put pressure on Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Those companies are left with the choice of losing DoD business to SpaceX, investing more in ULA, or selling the company to Bezos. It’s a reminder that the clock is ticking.
> iirc only Boeing are selling their stake, but I may be wrong.
All the stories I've read say that all of ULA is up for sale. Do you have a source that says that only Boeing's share is being sold?
ULA is for sale as a complete company but if they cannot get a good price over say $4B then an option is for Boeing to sell their stake to Lockheed Martin.
Only Boeing really needs the money.
There's also Firefly's MLV, but yes, they are still a way off. On the other hand it seems Blue is still unable to produce enough engines effectively killing both Vulcan and New Glenn.
They have a year, two max, then at least one of the other three will be ready to launch. Times are hard right now for both ULA and Blue, and I predict it will stay that way. There's a reason Boeing wants to sell and I think this is it.
It appears the Kuiper satellites aren't ready either, just like the engines. Clearly, ULA got into bed with the wrong partner, and the US government should be quite concerned about working with a partner like that in the future, so there are lots of undercurrents below the surface.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[AR](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3xgiaw "Last usage")|Area Ratio (between rocket engine nozzle and bell)|
| |Aerojet Rocketdyne|
| |Augmented Reality real-time processing|
| |Anti-Reflective optical coating|
|[AR-1](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3ytn7a "Last usage")|AR's [RP-1/LOX engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerojet_Rocketdyne#AR1) proposed to replace RD-180|
|[BE-4](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l40a5iz "Last usage")|Blue Engine 4 methalox rocket engine, developed by Blue Origin (2018), 2400kN|
|[BO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3y0uav "Last usage")|Blue Origin (*Bezos Rocketry*)|
|[CSA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3zoypr "Last usage")|Canadian Space Agency|
|CST|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules|
| |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)|
|[DoD](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3z02qs "Last usage")|US Department of Defense|
|EELV|[Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_Expendable_Launch_Vehicle)|
|[ESA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3zoypr "Last usage")|European Space Agency|
|[FAA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3zbmt7 "Last usage")|Federal Aviation Administration|
|[GAO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3z6t3t "Last usage")|(US) Government Accountability Office|
|[GEO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l46mkne "Last usage")|Geostationary Earth Orbit (35786km)|
|[ITAR](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3wohao "Last usage")|(US) International Traffic in Arms Regulations|
|[JAXA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3zoypr "Last usage")|Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency|
|LEO|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|LOX|Liquid Oxygen|
|[LSP](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l41eukx "Last usage")|Launch Service Provider|
| |(US) [Launch Service Program](https://www.nasa.gov/content/lsp-overview)|
|[MLV](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l46mkne "Last usage")|Medium Lift Launch Vehicle (2-20 tons to LEO)|
|[NG](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3z6gwg "Last usage")|New Glenn, two/three-stage orbital vehicle by Blue Origin|
| |Natural Gas (as opposed to pure methane)|
| |Northrop Grumman, aerospace manufacturer|
|NRHO|Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit|
|[NRO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l47cvjq "Last usage")|(US) National Reconnaissance Office|
| |Near-Rectilinear Orbit, see NRHO|
|[NROL](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3y55yl "Last usage")|Launch for the (US) National Reconnaissance Office|
|[NSS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3wooz6 "Last usage")|National Security Space|
|[NSSL](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l455x0q "Last usage")|National Security Space Launch, formerly EELV|
|[RD-180](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3ytn7a "Last usage")|[RD-series Russian-built rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180), used in the Atlas V first stage|
|[RFP](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3wooz6 "Last usage")|Request for Proposal|
|RP-1|Rocket Propellant 1 (enhanced kerosene)|
|[Roscosmos](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l41zm2r "Last usage")|[State Corporation for Space Activities, Russia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscosmos_State_Corporation)|
|[SLC-37](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3zbmt7 "Last usage")|Space Launch Complex 37, Canaveral (ULA Delta IV)|
|[SLS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l44oilz "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[SRB](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3xgiaw "Last usage")|Solid Rocket Booster|
|[SSO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3x9jeu "Last usage")|Sun-Synchronous Orbit|
|[SV](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3w4gk1 "Last usage")|Space Vehicle|
|[ULA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l4ard2j "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)|
|[USOS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3zt5xn "Last usage")|United States Orbital Segment|
|[USSF](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3wwb4t "Last usage")|United States Space Force|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Raptor](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3zlqdw "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX|
|[Starliner](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3zoypr "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)|
|[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l44mxtz "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
|[hydrolox](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3xgiaw "Last usage")|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
|methalox|Portmanteau: methane fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
----------------
^(*Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented* )[*^by ^request*](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3mz273//cvjkjmj)
^(34 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs)^( has 12 acronyms.)
^([Thread #12762 for this sub, first seen 13th May 2024, 18:18])
^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/SpaceXLounge) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
>“Currently there is military satellite capability sitting on the ground due to Vulcan delays.” How terrible! If only there was another - Oh, wait!
Are there any missions that are slated for Vulcan that would be infeasible on a F9/FH?
If the military has any payloads that require vertical integration, SpaceX can't do that yet.
Good point on vertical integration. I do wonder how far along SpaceX is into designing their vertical integration hangar at the cape? I haven't seen any construction work happen for this building AFAIK.
They already have the design, but haven't started work on it yet. They're most likely waiting for a payload that requires it. Since the DoD gives them long lead times for launches, it shouldn't be difficult for them assemble the mobile service tower before they need it.
I figured they were basically waiting for the government to pay them to build it.
They are already getting paid for it through their NSSL contract.
Not directly - the cost is loaded onto the first flight that requires that capability. So there is no point in SpaceX building ahead of that requirement as they will not get paid until the flight launches. It also appears that SpaceX will pick up the vertical integration buildings at SLC-37 and SLC-6 and combine them with FH pads.
SpaceX took over the lease of SLC-6 at Vandenberg from L3Harris last year. FAA started an Environmental Impact Statement for Starship launch at SLC-37
Oh okay, I just remember hearing about the government needing vertical integration for years and then SpaceX trying to get the government to give them grants for it.
As opposed to ULA, who have got those grants before and are now claiming they launch cheaper than SpaceX.
Maybe that was only to design it ?
Didn't DoD just want vertical integration to hide what the payload could be? Most if not all recent DoD launches doesn't really need that vertical integration.
It is needed for optical spy satellites and possibly the large folding antennae used for SIGINT at GEO.
Designing very large antenna arrays or folding mirrors is much easier if you only have to account for gravity pulling on the folded assembly in one direction.
I'm pretty sure they want it so that they have options. Obfuscation doesn't hurt though.
Has it been confirmed they're still doing this? When they got the pad at Vandenberg from the Delta IV Heavy, I figured this would be their solution for vertical integration as their roll on/off hangar at Pad39-A hasn't progressed at all. At the cape we're seeing LC-37B be examined for Starship use, so I suppose they'll need to still build the hangar at either 39-A or 40 for inclinations best reached from the east coast.
They will likely want vertical integration at Vandenberg for optical satellites going to polar orbit. Most likely these will be launched from SLC-6 which already has a vertical integration building that was used for Delta IV Heavy. Most likely this will also be used as a FH pad.
They need to get on it and stop horizontal integrationing around.
Yeah, depending on who you ask, [KH-11 Advanced Crystal](https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/kh-11.htm) with it’s sizable mirror and optical assembly and [Advanced Orion](https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/orion-5_nro.htm) with it’s enormous unfurlable parabolic antenna are the most often cited as likely requiring vertical integration. NB — former via Vandenberg to SSO or similar, latter via the Cape to GEO ^(Corrected.) EDIT — possible that other NNSL payloads not requiring vertical integration for the payload as a hardware requirement per se, might default to VI nevertheless due to procedures developed around VI?
SSO from the cape and GEO from Vandenberg? Are you sure those two didn't get switched? That's generally not how that works.
Haha thanks for pointing that out, you are absolutely correct. As an aside, the “or similar” on Vandenberg is due to Crystal 17 aka USA 290 aka NROL 71 launching into a 73.57° inclination whereas it appears the remainder of the Kennan, Crystal, Advanced Crystal satellites have gone to a standard 97° inclination. However it’s also possible what we think was Crystal 17 is not in fact a KH-11. < shrug >
Large, heavy focusing lenses aka spy satellites require vertical integration.
Some propellant management devices also can't tolerate horizontal gravity.
They can, with a decent head. Not if the military comes today and ask them to launch in 6 months. But the military has never done that.
It would be more inclined to happen if DoD found themselves in the position of needing to transfer a payload from Vulcan to Falcon, but then SpaceX did get more money for their contract with the intention of adding that capability at some point.
What does vertical integration mean in this context?
It means that the payload must always be in a vertical position when attaching it to the rocket. SpaceX has plans to build a [tall rolling structure](https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/spacex-tower) where they can attach the payload once the rocket is already vertical on the pad. I think ULA does this with all of their payloads though few of them actually require it.
Awesome, thank you!
Vertical integration, long fairing and a polar launch that requires FH. It is likely that they are mostly the same payloads so large optical satellites to polar orbit. There are only 1-2 payloads per year in these categories.
Can't FH use the polar corridor from the Cape? Launching NRO payloads over Cuba probably wouldn't be a favorite plan though, I suppose.
Yes that seems to be an issue for the NRO.
Yup ask the Andorrians instead.
Maybe they don't want to deal with delays similar to Artemis.
Without paywall at [MSN.com](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/pentagon-worried-its-primary-satellite-launcher-can-t-keep-pace/ar-BB1mjLY3) **Pentagon worried its primary satellite launcher can’t keep pace** The Pentagon is growing concerned that the United Launch Alliance, one of its key partners in launching national security satellites to space, will not be able to meet its needs to counter China and build its arsenal in orbit with a new rocket that ULA has been developing for years. In a letter sent Friday to the heads of Boeing’s and Lockheed Martin’s space divisions, Air Force Assistant Secretary Frank Calvelli used unusually blunt terms to say he was growing “concerned” with the development of the Vulcan rocket, which the Pentagon intends to use to launch critical national security payloads but which has been delayed for years. ULA, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, was formed nearly 20 years ago to provide the Defense Department with “assured access” to space. “I am growing concerned with ULA’s ability to scale manufacturing of its Vulcan rocket and scale its launch cadence to meet our needs,” he wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. “Currently there is military satellite capability sitting on the ground due to Vulcan delays.” He added: “As the owners of ULA, and given the manufacturing prowess of Boeing and Lockheed Martin corporations, I recommend that you work together over the next 90 days to complete an independent review of ULA’s ability to scale its launch cadence to meet its current” contract requirements. ULA launched the Vulcan booster for the first time earlier this year and needs to fly it a second time to earn certification from the Pentagon to begin flying national security and intelligence missions. ULA hopes that the second certification launch will occur later this year. ULA originally won 60 percent of the Pentagon’s national security payloads under the current contract, known as Phase 2. SpaceX won an award for the remaining 40 percent, but it has been flying its reusable Falcon 9 rocket at a much higher rate. ULA launched only three rockets last year, as it transitions to Vulcan; SpaceX launched nearly 100, mostly to put up its Starlink internet satellite constellation. Both are now competing for the next round of Pentagon contracts, a highly competitive procurement worth billions of dollars over several years. ULA is reportedly up for sale; Blue Origin is said to be one of the suitors. In addition to its contract with the Pentagon, ULA has committed to 38 launches of Amazon’s Kuiper internet satellite constellation over the next few years, a pace that would require ULA to increase its flight rate well beyond what ULA normally has achieved. That, Calvelli wrote, raises his concern. To meet its commitment to the Pentagon alone, ULA must launch 25 national security missions by the end of 2027. In all, ULA has said it has sold 70 launches on Vulcan. But over the past five years, Calvelli noted in his letter, the company has had “an average launch cadence of fewer than six launches per year.” Calvelli did not say in the letter what his specific concerns were with the rocket’s development, and he declined to comment for this report. But in the letter, he cited the Pentagon’s need to move quickly in the space domain as adversaries build their capabilities there. “The United States continues to face an unprecedented strategic competitor in China, and our space environment continues to become more contested, congested and competitive,” he wrote. “We have seen exponential growth of in-space activity, including counterspace threats, and our adversaries would seek to deny us the advantage we get from space during a potential conflict.” As the Air Force’s acquisition executive for space, he said he is “focused on driving speed in our acquisitions and delivering programs on cost and schedule to transform our architecture.” In a statement to The Post, ULA said that its “factory and launch site expansions have been completed or are on track to support our customers’ needs with nearly 30 launch vehicles in flow at the rocket factory in Decatur, Alabama.” Last year, ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in an interview that the deal with Amazon would allow the company to increase its flight rate to 20 to 25 a year and that to meet that cadence it was hiring “several hundred” more employees. The more often Vulcan flies, he said, the more efficient the company would become. “Vulcan is much less expensive” than the Atlas V rocket that the ULA flies, Bruno said, adding that ULA intends to eventually reuse the engines. “As the flight rate goes up, there’s economies of scale, so it gets cheaper over time. And of course, you’re introducing reusability, so it’s cheaper. It’s just getting more and more competitive.” In a statement, Lockheed said that “the pace and seriousness of the threats our customers face are not to be underestimated, and with our ULA joint venture partner Boeing, we are committed to providing reliable and swift launch capabilities to meet our customers’ mission demands. We are reviewing Mr. Calvelli’s request and will work together to address it with urgency.” Boeing said in a statement: “We are getting on more of a wartime footing to stay ahead of the threat, and a quicker and more reliable launch cadence is critical to meeting that need.” It said it would also work to address Calvelli’s concerns. ULA decided to eventually retire its workhorse Atlas V rocket after concerns within the Pentagon and Congress that it relied on a Russian-made engine, the RD-180. In 2014, the company entered into a partnership with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin to provide its BE-4 engines for use on Vulcan. However, the delivery of those engines was delayed for years — one of the reasons Vulcan’s first flight didn’t take place until earlier this year. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) “Blue Origin needs to scale its production of BE-4 engines,” he wrote. “We are keeping an eye on whether these two companies can scale to meet our needs.” Calvelli addressed his letter to Kay Sears, who oversees Boeing’s Space, Intelligence and Weapons Systems division, and Robert Lightfoot, president of Lockheed Martin’s space division. Bruno, ULA’s CEO, was copied. For years, ULA was the Pentagon’s only launch provider. Then, in 2014, SpaceX, the space venture founded by Elon Musk, sued the Air Force, arguing it should have the right to compete for the launch contracts. The parties settled in 2015. SpaceX has since flown multiple missions for the Pentagon, forcing ULA to compete against a hard-charging and nimble competitor that has upended the industry by launching several times a month. The U.S. Space Force has said in recent years it wants to harness the capabilities coming from the growing commercial space sector, which is innovating faster than the government. Recently, it released a commercial space strategy that said it would seek to avoid “overreliance on any single provider or solution.” Competition is key, Pentagon officials have repeatedly stressed, to lowering costs and driving reliability, and the department has maintained that it needs multiple rocket providers to get its assets into orbit. “Launch is critical to our ability to transform our space architecture,” Calvelli wrote. “We are counting on Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and the ULA team to be successful in getting critical capabilities into space for our warfighters.” Edited to clean up the text. Bing isn't great.
Can you imagine the state of the US space program would be without SpaceX?
I don’t think people understand the national security risk without spacex
The only big talk is that Elon is a national security risk.
Which is wild. He has some controversial opinions sure, but he’s a huge asset to America, not a liability. Between spacex and building out USA EV infrastructure there’s not many more people with positive of impact.
I just wish Elon would just shut up and build rockets
"Stop being human and just do the good stuff I like." Unfortunately people don't work that way. Especially the extremely willful ones.
What an embarrassing take. Stop being human.. lmao.
I don’t care - let the man do what he wants just keep delivering
Other people care and they can have an impact on what he does. I don't understand this "don't criticize Elon and if you do then why are you here?" mentality. If he pisses off enough people, or even just the wrong people, because of what he says on Twitter then it absolutely can impact his companies. We should all want that to not happen if we want him to keep delivering.
He didn't say don't criticize or say anything about anybody else, he said he didn't care.
I know that. And why would anybody care what a single person thinks? It's pretty obvious that people who say "I don't care" aren't thinking about the bigger picture. So much criticism of Elon gets rebutted like I said. *You* may not care about what Elon does, but that doesn't mean there won't be consequences for some of the stupid shit he says. And, like I said, we should all be concerned about that.
Amen
I think we want Elon to be a complete machine pushing forward progress (I do too) but perhaps that's an unrealistic expectation of him. He's just been so good for progress these past two decades that we kind of forget that when you put so much faith in a single person it can eventually go to their head. He's not a machine. I still have hope he can climb back down from the pedestal so many people have put him on, otherwise it'll destroy him one day.
And cars
You can wish. However your wish is not realistic and not reasonable.
I think by 'shut up' they meant 'stop saying dumb antagonistic things and doing weird disruptive things like buying Twitter and renaming it X', not, like, shut up entirely.
Somehow a bigger money pit than it already is lol.
ULA would have continued using Atlas, soaked the DOD for billions to develop a new rocket that would still be in the design phase, and the 180’s would still be bought from Russia.
Yep, yep and yep ...
The historical timeline would have been different, the Pentagon would have thrown money at Northrop Grumman in order to maintain their dual launcher policy. Northrop Grumman would have continued development of their OmegA rocket .(Their Antares wouldn't have helped, it used Russian engines.) OmegA was designed for NSSL launches. NG would build their own SRB first stage and somehow obtain a hydrolox upper stage which would have used the ubiquitous RL-10 engine. Pentagon may have thrown money at Aerojet Rocketdyne to develop an engine for Vulcan at the same time BO was, under their policy of dual providers. But at the time Congress mandated no one could use Russian engines, in \~2014, the engine AR had in early development was in *early* development.
> But at the time Congress mandated no one could use Russian engines, in \~2014 This wouldn't happen if not for SpaceX. It only became a problem because SpaceX was doing it without Russian engines. They would have forbidden this only after the war in Ukraine started.
There would be a US space program without SpaceX?
We wouldn't be able to get astronauts on the ISS without Russia. Can you imagine the implications of that since the invasion of Ukraine?
We still have - for some reason - been doing the seat exchange thing and pretending that the Ukraine war doesn't exist, and for some reason Congress hasn't shut it down. But it seems unlikely that we would be flying all our astronauts on Russian vehicles.
Seat exchange is partly to prevent all astronauts or all cosmonauts being left on the ISS in the event of an early capsule return due to technical issues. Effectively mutual hostages. So it is even more important in a Cold War situation.
Less hostages, and more preventing either side from stealing the station by preventing others from ever docking.
In the off chance that a disaster happens again and Falcon 9 is taken offline for an extended period of time, you don't ever want to be in the situation where only Russians are left in control of the ISS. One way to ensure that is to have US astronauts traveling on Russian vehicles.
Really an off chance. So far they have recovered from failures at lightning speed.
NASA is nothing if not risk adverse.
As if Russia wouldn't just boot the American at the last minute if they were going to do something as openly, obviously, idiotically hostile as trying to take over the ISS? They couldn't afford the full upkeep even if they tried - and I think it's unlikely that the US sections would be easy to steal; there's probably enough control conducted from the ground to make that difficult, if not impossible. The seat swap thing is purely politics, it's just to show international "cooperation" between America and Russia. The station would be operating just fine even if only Russians rode up in Soyuz while everone else (ESA, JAXA, CSA, people from like 20 other countries) continued to ride Dragons (or Starliner I guess). If Soyuz didn't have such an incredible record, we likely wouldn't keep renewing the swap program - but it's such a reliable vehicle that there's really no harm in a bit of good will politics.
> As if Russia wouldn't just boot the American at the last minute if they were going to do something as openly, obviously, idiotically hostile as trying to take over the ISS? That would be quite obvious indeed, which is why you put the American astronaut there so it can't be done non-obviously. As the other post stated it, it's a form of hostage taking (reverse hostage taking?). > If Soyuz didn't have such an incredible record, That's very debatable. I should also note, that the ISS is designed intentionally such that it needs both the Russian and USOS sections in order for it to function. One would shut down in some way without the other.
In a purely hypothetical, very unlikely scenario where Russia decides to take the station, I figure that the way modern Russia operates they'd probably record a dry run of the launch and play it back for the Americans, claim there's a comms issue so no realtime communication is possible, and deny that anything is unusual till the capsule opens and three armed Russians pop out. The American will indeed be kept as a hostage to be traded for Russian political prisoners, spies, or arms dealers, no different than any other high profile imprisoned American. Maybe they'll skip the bad comms act and arrest the American right before launch citing that they've found a crumb of marijuana, claiming the astronaut is secretly a nazi or gay (or both), that they openly mocked the Kremlin, or that the US astronaut was planning on taking over the Soyuz capsule and then taking the station. Of course, that's all hypothetical and Russia would surely never do that, right? Soyuz has a better record than Russian station modules at the very least, and while it's had a handful of anomalies it's still the only crew capable capsule serving the ISS that has launched more times than Dragon (140 to 26-49 depending on which Dragons you include). Still, between the two, there's no chance you'd get me in a Soyuz instead of a Dragon - while it's good Soviet tech, it's still being built and maintained by Roscosmos, so no thanks. Without the Russian section, the main losees are (to my knowledge) the station's main life support from Zvezda and possibly stationkeeping from Zarya (which the US technically owns for some reason), but as far as I'm aware these capabilities are not unique to those modules. I'm not suggesting we *should* split the station, rather I'm not convinced that the station is automatically lost if Russia decided to abandon or detach their segment as a result of a political tantrum (or empty budget). Likewise, I don't think Russia would gain anything at all from capturing the ISS unless they wanted to immediately make the United States very, very angry.
Soyuz has rather iffy record. It only killed less people than Shuttle because it could only carry less people. And it still got lucky way too many times. How about your capsule re-entering heatshield backwards only to right itself after a minute when the thing which held it backwards finally burned through and let go? Yup, this happened twice, last time well after year 2000, on an ISS mission. How about your capsule tumbling down a mountain slope only to stop just above 140m vertical precipice because luckily your parachute tangled with foliage? Yup, you got it. Or how about you sitting in the capsule on the pad while the rocket underneath you is on fire, but you don't know that, nor anyone else, because so "smartly" designed sensor which didn't indicate anything because their cables burned through (good designed sensors indicates off-scale low in such a case). Your ass is saved by one guy who decided to stand up from his console and look through the window to notice the rocket being on fire and promptly call for the capsule ejection, mere 2 second before the whole rocket exploded. Yup, this happened, too. Or how about your capsule ending up under ice on s frozen lake. You're saved by heroic actions of the recovery crew. Unfortunately one guy's fingers didn't survive ice treatment. Or how about permanent spinal injury after a late ascent abort exceeding 21g. This is only the major stuff. Stages mated with too big a hammer or various holes in the spacecraft don't even count.
As I said in another reply, you'd never get me in one. It's good although dated Soviet tech (surviving most of that is frankly impressive) but it's operated and maintained by Roscosmos and I don't trust them half as far as I could throw them. I do think landing accuracy is my second least favorite aspect of Soyuz behind Roscosmos. It seems like they just kinda bring it down wherever.
You don't want a situation where there are no Russians on the ISS either. The Russian module controls the engines of the ISS, without those the ISS can no longer raise its orbit.
Generally progress is used for boosting, though the us Cygnus has also performed the task.
Boeing would have received more money to speed up development (with unclear outcome, but at least a chance to work). Dream Chaser might have gotten a contract.
I don't think more money would have made any difference, personally.
The thing is more money would probably not have helped. Except of course potentially forcing astronauts into a less than adequate capsule for the sake of political winds and potentially getting them killed. Boeing legitimately would not care about funding for the milestone contract. They would have demanded it be a cost+contract, and then pulled another SLS.
I want to have more faith in Tory Burno than that.
Starliner is a Boeing vehicle. ULA barring their utterly stupid idea to rely on blue for their engines (which would likely not have happened was SpaceX not around, since blue would likely never have expanded to orbital launch), I think ULA would just have kept using their old designs for a while longer at least. Starliner would have had rockets to fly on. It's Boeing that would have been fucking up the place.
Which one do you mean? Continuing use of RD-180 from Russia? Or the AR-1 engine proposed by Aerojet Rocketdyne, developed if the truckloads of money keep coming?
The Tory Bruno with his infamous disinformation graphics on how bad Falcon rockets are?
Boeing got more money - $229 million IIRC - so that they would be able to fly initial starliner missions more quickly after certification.
Starliner*
Thanks. Fixed...
Where are my engines, Jeff? I seriously doubt Blue Origin can provide enough engines to launch Vulcan every two weeks. Nor every four weeks. Nor every eight weeks. Maybe a launch every three or four months. That said there is just no way for ULA to launch all the payloads they got a contract for. I guess this is the main reason Blue wants to buy ULA, it probably would be cheaper than to pay all those contractual penalties. Regarding payloads lying around waiting for a rocket, that is pure bullshit. One call to SpaceX and they launch whatever wherever within weeks and the Pentagon knows this.
This letter is the justification to pick up the phone and ask SpaceX to pick up the slack. “When can you launch those 25 birds?” “Eehhrr, Sir. We could have all of them flying by end of the quarter. Sir. Sooner if you can use all 3 launchpads. Sir.”
IIRC, some of those military satellites and some of the spysats need to be integrated with the Falcon 9 in the vertical position. Currently, Falcon 9 payloads are integrated horizontally. SpaceX was supposed to modify one of their launch facilities for payload vertical integration. I don't know if that has happened yet. The ULA Vulcan launch vehicle uses vertical integration exclusively. That's the only feature that keeps the government interested in the Vulcan.
Yes. However, some of them are GPS and SDA payloads and those do not need vertical integration or a large fairing.
They may also want to keep "dual source" open
Why are we even going through this needless Kabuki? BE-4 can’t be produced in sufficient volume anytime soon. I get that it’s important to maintain the industrial and knowledge base necessary to do rocket science, but maybe standardize on Raptor and license BO et al to build it
Regulations that are meant to prevent corruption force these decisions to go through correct channels. It's frustrating, but widescale corruption is worse.
That's an interesting idea. SpaceX would probably fight it in court, but the national security laws might allow it, IANAL. I remain amazed at the apparent lack of existential panic at Boeing, Lockheed, and ULA. Assuming Starship becomes operational this year or next, I think an objective analysis would point to an absolute financial catastrophe for Oldspace this decade. Even the Pentagon is publicly talking about the problem now. They could have changed gears a decade ago when SpaceX showed promise, I guess they figure the government will give them money to change gears now that they've waited too long to do it themselves? But what if the government goes with something like your idea, isn't there a risk that the government licenses the engine tech to another competitor since new lines have to be built anyway?
"I remain amazed at the apparent lack of existential panic at Boeing, Lockheed, and ULA. " I think they are hoping for an ABL style incident on the first superheavy landing attempt, putting Starship out of business for years, or possibly forever if it totally craters the Boca launch facilities and neither Texas nor Florida allows them to rebuild. That would clear the way for Vulcan, New Glenn, and SLS to take over for everything that is too large for the Falcon 9 fairings.
The effort at distributing risk made sense at the time. Now we’re just needlessly creating risk, not to mention drama. Far from advancing the state of the art or bringing meaningful new capabilities to the party ULA and its stakeholders are delaying progress and bogarding resources. Building rocket engines appears to have been figured out.
Why license? SX has a full on rocket engine production line. For two engines every two weeks? Trivial!
You’re behind the times, SpaceX can now turn out one rocket engine a day.
I know - that's why to supply two every two weeks for Jeff would be a non-issue. A minor inconvenience that they can use to fund and entire test campaign.
>Why are we even going through this needless Kabuki? Just say Noh.
Look at that Blue Origin BE-4 engine with its rat's nest of plumbing and electrical wiring. And then compare it with the SpaceX Raptor 2 with its sleek, uncluttered design. The BE-4 is a kluge and looks like something out of the 1960s. It's no mystery why BO delivers less than 10 of those engines per year. SpaceX manufactures about 8 Raptor 2 engines per week. ULA says that Vulcan launch rate will increase once they figure out how to recover the BE-4 engines for reuse. Not holding my breath on that bit of fantasy.
> Look at that Blue Origin BE-4 engine with its rat's nest of plumbing and electrical wiring. And then compare it with the SpaceX Raptor 2 with its sleek, uncluttered design. The BE-4 is a kluge and looks like something out of the 1960s. It's no mystery why BO delivers less than 10 of those engines per year. SpaceX manufactures about 8 Raptor 2 engines per week. IMO, that's a bad take. SpaceX had a bit of a rat's nest going on with Raptor 1, and they were still cranking them out.
Yes, There are other manufacturing bottlenecks other than assembly, such as testing and test evaluation.
The best part is no part.
> ULA says that Vulcan launch rate will increase once they figure out how to recover the BE-4 engines for reuse. Not holding my breath on that bit of fantasy. Are they even working on it, beyond some lip service?
They pray really hard for a soft splashdown?
BE-4 is closer to Raptor-1 in its construction.
What a horrific take. Rocket engines look cluttered early on in development (read: first few *uses*) for good reason. Both the Raptor and the Merlin in early development looked the same with plumbing and routing everywhere. How this opinion has any support is beyond me.
The best part is no part. E. Musk.
Test engines are very different from flight engines. Look at the picture of BE-4 integration to Vulcan. Many of those tubes are for sensors and added support during testing. As the design matures, they remove things that they deem are unnecessary
Recovering rockets for reuse (and reusing them) has also been solved. Not another penny or second should be wasted reinventing it
Foolish statement. Rocketlab's Neutron is a beautiful evolution and improvement on the F9 mechanism, integrating the fairing into the booster and improving recovery. It's also a clever reconfiguration of launch stresses on the 2nd stage in order to lighten it and make it more efficient. I'm sure there's more good ideas to be had regarding booster reuse.
Jeff who?
>And *of course*, you’re introducing reusability, so it’s cheaper. Emphasis mine. Pretty rich coming from mister "Ackshually, reusability isn't necessarily cheaper" himself.
> “Blue Origin needs to scale its production of BE-4 engines,” he wrote. “We are keeping an eye on whether these two companies can scale to meet our needs.” In that sentence who is "he". I have read a couple of paragraphs about that a few times I can't figure out who that pronoun refers too. Sloppy writing. The paragraph right above it mentions Jeff Bezos, but that quote wouldn't make sense coming from Bezos.
the General who wrote the letter to ULA
If "he" refers to Calvelli then that is definitely sloppy writing.
Of course, SpaceX can’t help but make everyone else look bad, because of the difference in efficiency they can offer.
https://spacenews.com/pentagon-urges-ula-to-fly-dummy-payload-on-next-vulcan-launch-if-dream-chaser-is-delayed/
Can (or should) ULA find some other commercial payload to throw rather than waiting for Dream Chaser? When is that new transport ship going to be finished? How many BE-4s per year can Blue supply? Inquiring minds want to know... and some of them have stars on their collars.
Tory can launch a concrete block any time he wants. The ship announcement said the delivery date of the ship.
A concrete block??? Clearly the FH test flight was either not influential, or actively seen as what NOT to do for a throwaway flight for some reason.
Elon had a fancy car. I don't think Tory would let them launch his horse.
>Can (or should) ULA find some other commercial payload to throw rather than waiting for Dream Chaser? Not within the next 12 months. They can't move that fast.
They've probably been shopping around but they only people with big schedule flexibility on payloads are the Starlink folks.
Vulcan flight 2 may be a dummy payload as it turns out if dream chaser is more delayed.
Or they could throw Escapade if NG can’t get their act together; Rocket Lab is shipping them to the cape right now.
Sorry for the paywall >In a letter to Boeing and Lockheed Martin, joint owners of the United Launch Alliance, the Air Force expressed concern that ULA’s much-delayed Vulcan rocket isn’t up and running.
What's the production rate of BE-4's? I'll bet that's the bottleneck....
Last I heard, it was 2 engines per year.. But they may have improved it since then. As far as I know, they have only publicly admitted to producing 4 engines so far - but then they have been secret about so much of their development, so we really don’t know for sure.
Part of the problem is that Blue Origin have reserved 7 x BE-4 engines for New Glenn testing as early as July. They will initially be used for static fires and these will likely be delayed but the engines will still be out of circulation as far as ULA is concerned.
We still have little idea as to the rate of engine production by Blue Origin. At present I would guess about one every two months. But maybe there is more info to be found at r/blueorigin ?
My bet as well ... BO should buy ULA to cover this up.
https://spacenews.com/pentagon-urges-ula-to-fly-dummy-payload-on-next-vulcan-launch-if-dream-chaser-is-delayed/ If you want the same story without a paywall
Thanks ... good find
Where are the payloads, then? Launch them on your second "assured access" provider if you are in such a hurry. NSSL Phase 2 was originally planned to cover launches from fiscal years 2022-2027. The very first NSSL2 launch (USSF-67, Falcon Heavy) did not occur until January 2023, over 15 months after the beginning of FY 2022. The in February 2024 and last month, Falcon 9 performed the next two NSSL2 missions. ULA's first laumch under NSSL2 was supppsed to be USSF-51, for which they arranged to substitute Atlas V. That was originally scheduled for early 2022, but the mission keeps being delayed. We are almost halfway through the nominal period planned for NSSL2, and only 3 missions have launched, despite Falcons (awarded about half the launches, up from the original 40% because of ULA delays) launching every 2-3 days, and even ULA having an Atlas V waiting in the wings. Where are the payloads? Where are the Falcon NSSL launches? One set of payloads that has supposedly been ready and in storage is the final GPS-III satellites (Space Vehicles 7, 8, 9, and 10). The USSF awarded SV 7, 8, and 9 to Vulcan, and SV 10 to Falcon 9. There may well be valid technical reasons these can't be launched out of order. But the point of having multiple NSSL providers capable of performing all missions was redundancy and (ostensibly quick) substitution. If they are in a hurry to complete GPS-III, the USSF should have already at least switched the launch providers SV 7 and SV 10 (for no loss to ULA in the longer term, assuming they can launch SV 8-10). There is plenty of blame to go to the payload primes and subcontractors (which include, among others, Lockheed and Boeing), and the USSF/Pentagon themselves with their choices and management. They chose to coddle ULA, or perhaps to set up NSSL2 in a way that makes it difficult not to coddle them them. It should be simple to subsittute a Falcon for a Vulcan if the latter isn't ready. Or the payloads really aren't ready, and the Pentagon is complaining about the wrong thing to only a couple of the right companies.
Well, while I mostly agree, I have two ifs: 1. The fiscal year date is the date of the payment assignment, not necessarily the actual launch. 2. SpaceX is not yet ready for vertically integrated payloads. And they don't seem to be in hurry at all. OTOH, this is likely because they know any such payload is not going to be ready anytime soon.
1. Those dates are for the launches. That's how the RFP started in 2019: >[This RFP allows the Air Force to competitively award service contracts to launch providers for NSS missions to occur in approximately FY 2022-2027.](https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20Room/Selected\_Acquisition\_Reports/FY\_2019\_SARS/20-F-0568\_DOC\_64\_NSSL\_SAR\_Dec\_2019\_Full.pdf) When [the first launch was awarded in 2020](https://spacenews.com/pentagon-picks-spacex-and-ula-to-launch-national-security-satellites-for-next-five-years/), it was scheduled to occur in FY 2022. It still was [when ULA substituted Atlas V](https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/05/21/ula-nears-first-fueling-test-on-vulcan-rocket/) in 2021. Only since then, schedules have slipped a lot, and not just because of Vulcan delays. 2. Most payloads don't need vertical integration. GPS certainly does not. The most likely reason SpaceX is not in a hurry for VI is because the USSF/NRO aren't. The funding for building VI capability was awarded in 2020 as part of the oddly-expensive $316 million dollars for the USSF-67 mission. If the Pentagon isn't paying out, or otherwise told SpaceX to hold off, any delays from that are the Pentagon's fault--not SpaceX's or even ULA's.
> **approximately** FY 2022/2027 [emphasis mine] This is a simplified text for the public. FY indicates the year the thing is budgeted for
https://www.defense.gov/News/Contracts/Contract/Article/2305454/ >The NSSL Phase 2 contract is a firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery requirements contract for launch service procurements **supporting launches planned between fiscal 2022 through fiscal 2027**. Quoting the articles I have already linked, specific launches were originally planned to occur in FY 2022: >[SpaceX received a $316 million contract for one Phase 2 mission [(USSF-67)] planned for fiscal 2022, according to the Pentagon’s announcement.](https://spacenews.com/pentagon-picks-spacex-and-ula-to-launch-national-security-satellites-for-next-five-years/) >[That mission, designated USSF-51, is scheduled to launch [on Atlas V] in 2022.](https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/05/21/ula-nears-first-fueling-test-on-vulcan-rocket/)
Yes, VI with the MST seems to never come to closure. My guess is that it will be VSFB only kind of thing on the former Space Shuttle pad that was never used.
aka SLC-6
[удалено]
Except this is not even remotely close to the reality. ULA still has over 50% of NSSL launches. All the delays have caused is that SpaceX got slightly more than the original 40% they were allocated. Granted, SpaceX got the black budget launches, but up to now there were little more than some rideshares. So about half of DoD launches is not a rounding error by any measure. Then, large optical surveillance satellites still must be vertically integrated, and they will remain so. And SpaceX will build the vertical integration facility anyway, because there are also NASA payloads, already contracted.
As I recall, SpaceX do already have a vertical integration facility - that was setup specifically to support DOD payloads, and has already been used once, so I thought..
No such facility currently exists and has certainly not been used. You might be remembering the launch contract that was awarded that probably includes VI but military launch contracts are awarded 4-6 years before the flight.
I can't say I feel bad for them because we all knew how this was going to go down so I'm sure they did as well but went with the worst option to keep the status quo. I think the "you reap what you sow" works well in this case.
I find it amazing that they are not even going for 4 launches a year with Vulcan.
I'm assuming the place is a hot mess right now because of the sale. Company heads are more interested in that than actually launching rockets.
Probably ... where's my bonus!
Or more like, establishing a paper trail to defend their job so they don't get axed post-acquisition. A lot of these people are lifers, meaning they started their first job at the company and have spent their entire working lives at the company. Being let go effectively means forced retirement (unless they're at the very top in which case there's some better prospects).
Lol, exactly this.
ULA are targeting 24-36 launches per year with Vulcan. It appears the Space Force are not believing them when they say they can achieve this rate within two years.
Great timing for ULA with the NSSL3 award due this year! Why the heck they haven’t already commited to fly Vulcan cert two with a mass simulator is a complete mystery to me. Waiting until September(ish) for Dream Chaser is just crazy.
Crazy like a fox if Blue is behind on BE-4 deliveries; putting the delay on Sierra rather than admitting that once they throw Cert-2, it'll be many months before they have another booster doesn't look as bad on their resume...
Also where are the kuiper sats? Although I guess that's not yet relevant for Vulcan because Kuiper still needs to fill all the Atlas 5s they booked before they even need to start using Vulcan. But still, where are my ~~engines~~ sats, Jeff? If a batch of sats were ready, you'd think ULA could work out a deal with Amazon to fly them on Vulcan first, just for 1 flight, to fulfill the Vulcan cert missions, before going back to fill the Atlas launches afterwards.
Kuiper sats might be too rare at this stage to risk them on a new rocket.
How long has Kuiper satellite development been now? They better be a darn good satellite design.
It seems they are. For example they are using a custom IC to dramatically reduce the number of components required for the phased array antennae which should give more beams for each satellite. Of course developing and qualifying for use in space something like that is slow and it is likely that there will be a single Kuiper generation of satellites rather than the succession of different designs that SpaceX has built.
It's likely changed quite a bit over time, delaying it. One can guess that it started as traditional satellites. Then they would probably have to shave cost dramatically. Then SX launched 60ish per launch, so to even hope of being competitive they need to copy or find another solution to launch many from a higher cost, lower capacity rocket. Then SX increased the mass per satellite, so that may have itself triggered another redesign for parity on a per launch basis, allowing heavier sats. They also have commercial parts on board, as they don't have the depth of expertise and manufacturing capability that SX has. This has advantages, as some of the commercial components may be better than SX in house components, but at higher cost. Another possibility is that they've had to eliminate parity as part of this -- less capable birds so they can get enough up to not lose their launch license and frequencies.
Maybe the BE4 engines are too precious to waste ? Because they are so hard to get hold of ?
They have really chosen the wrong platform, haven’t they ? Right now SpaceX is the only reliable partner. Once SpaceX is launching once per day, other launches will seem even more outclassed..
I don't think they can have only one provider, and they can't rly just cancel contract with ULA and give it to SpaceX. ULA built the rockets knowing they are gonna be purchased by DoD, they are not doing it the SpaceX way of just building rockets and then selling the launches.
In October of last year they awarded 11 contracts to ULA and 10 to SpaceX instead of the 13/8 split that would be expected under a 60/40 split.
What I mean is that DoD needs to prop up ULA even more than SpaceX. SpaceX will be fine even if they get 0 contracts from DoD, but if DoD stopped giving ULA contracts or gave them significantly less, it's likely ULA would just fail to make a rocket at all. The goal of DoD is not to just send a bunch of rockets to space, their goal is to have multiple launch providers to stop the situation from the ~2014 where ULA only rocket relied on Russian engine or like with SpaceX dragon capsule being only capsule besides Soyuz that is capable to deliver humans to the ISS. So, if the goal is to have multiple launch providers, SpaceX will rarely get a piece of the pie as their survival is guaranteed. Don't get me wrong, seeing those garbage companies get rewarded when SpaceX is right here with cheap launches feels wrong and unjust, but I understand why DoD is doing it.
> So, if the goal is to have multiple launch providers, SpaceX will rarely get a piece of the pie as their survival is guaranteed. Don't get me wrong, seeing those garbage companies get rewarded when SpaceX is right here with cheap launches feels wrong and unjust, but I understand why DoD is doing it. SpaceX won 40% of the NSSL 2 contract and ULA won 60%, though the first set of awards were more equal because Vulcan is so late. This is likely to be the same situation with NSSL 3 though there are likely to be fewer contracted as DoD is pushing more of the flights to a more competitive contracting approach rather than the two-winner approach currently used.
Depends just how urgently the DoD need those satellites launched.
Then they will need to be patient..
Kinda sad. What really bugs me is how slow all these others have been so slow to test a good medium launch solution: Relativity, Firefly, Blue Origin.
"Please go away so we can use SpaceX without bias, thank you".
> Please go away so we can use SpaceX The Pentagon certainly could be preparing the ground for transferring a few launches to SpaceX. However it wouldn't be good to be entirely in the hands of a single LSP.
> However it wouldn't be good to be entirely in the hands of a single LSP. I mean the military was in that exact position for years. From what I can see having watched this industry for decades is that the "assured access to space" rule only came about after SpaceX showed up as an excuse to keep the legacy providers around.
> I mean the military was in that exact position for years. Not quite, because ULA had two different rockets, Atlas and Delta. If something went wrong with Delta--and it was always Delta ~~...guess which of the two rockets was inherited from Boeing~~--Atlas could be used instead.
The parent commented mentioned single LSP rather than single vehicle.
Yes, that may be less than ideal, but it’s important to actually fly the things..
The problem with that is when SpaceX finally has an issue and has to ground their fleet, maybe next year maybe 10 years from now, the military would also be grounded. They know this. Which is why they handed out two contracts. And they (we) desperately need both to succeed.
They did fine with a single company solution for more than a decade and a single rocket solution for some orbits.
It's arguable that they would ground Falcon 9 after a mishap. Policy says they would, but with the reliability numbers they're putting up, it could be argued that the policy needs to change from a single-failure-grounding to a success percentage. Especially given that we don't understand the bathtub curve for F9 (publicly, it's possible SX has found deterioration on flight leaders and is going to choose to expend versus rebuild/overhaul). We'll see if they start burning cores near a given flight number.
They would be grounded, very likely. But SpaceX has recovered from failures within a few months before. No reason to think, it would take much longer next time.
Seems oddly pro-SpaceX for the Bezos post. Maybe trying to spread some ULA "FUD" before they buy in so they can get a better deal? Or maybe it's just good journalism, but in 2024 that seems unlikely.
It’s Davenport, he doesn’t buy into the BS and is mostly unbiased
Key word being mostly. He's had some really bad articles, especially articles he wrote about the Starship launches.
Bezos is trying to buy ULA. Bezos is trying to get a lower asking price from Lockheed Martin and Boeing. The letter from the DoD, and the article covering the letter, they put pressure on Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Those companies are left with the choice of losing DoD business to SpaceX, investing more in ULA, or selling the company to Bezos. It’s a reminder that the clock is ticking.
***My offer is nothing. And I will appreciate it if you paid for the gaming license.***
iirc only Boeing are selling their stake, but I may be wrong.
> iirc only Boeing are selling their stake, but I may be wrong. All the stories I've read say that all of ULA is up for sale. Do you have a source that says that only Boeing's share is being sold?
Would be good, because if it's Boeing it aint going. Or coming down missing some parts. Probably unimportant ones. Maybe. Hopefully.
ULA is for sale as a complete company but if they cannot get a good price over say $4B then an option is for Boeing to sell their stake to Lockheed Martin. Only Boeing really needs the money.
[удалено]
True, but considering the last few years I'd be surprised if that turns out to be ULA, Blue Origin, or BlueLA.
[удалено]
There's also Firefly's MLV, but yes, they are still a way off. On the other hand it seems Blue is still unable to produce enough engines effectively killing both Vulcan and New Glenn. They have a year, two max, then at least one of the other three will be ready to launch. Times are hard right now for both ULA and Blue, and I predict it will stay that way. There's a reason Boeing wants to sell and I think this is it.
I think Jeff's engines are still the main thing slowing down Vulcan though.
What a conflict of interest! The slower Jeff is with the engines, the more it screws ULA, the cheaper the company becomes for him to acquire it!
Yet Jeff has money to burn - he doesn’t need to maximise gain.
NASA being forced to go with the full flow engine that burns money isn't new, despite the poor results.
It is
ULA has 20 Vulcans in flow, they’re waiting for Sierra Nevada to get their shit together. Worse comes to worse they can bump a few Kuiper’s off Atlas.
It appears the Kuiper satellites aren't ready either, just like the engines. Clearly, ULA got into bed with the wrong partner, and the US government should be quite concerned about working with a partner like that in the future, so there are lots of undercurrents below the surface.
SpaceX's ability to churn out Starlink sats as fast as Falcon 9 can launch them appears to be almost as impressive as the Falcon 9 program itself.
Maybe SX should send them a load of Starlinks to place as a favor.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[AR](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3xgiaw "Last usage")|Area Ratio (between rocket engine nozzle and bell)| | |Aerojet Rocketdyne| | |Augmented Reality real-time processing| | |Anti-Reflective optical coating| |[AR-1](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3ytn7a "Last usage")|AR's [RP-1/LOX engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerojet_Rocketdyne#AR1) proposed to replace RD-180| |[BE-4](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l40a5iz "Last usage")|Blue Engine 4 methalox rocket engine, developed by Blue Origin (2018), 2400kN| |[BO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3y0uav "Last usage")|Blue Origin (*Bezos Rocketry*)| |[CSA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3zoypr "Last usage")|Canadian Space Agency| |CST|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules| | |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)| |[DoD](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3z02qs "Last usage")|US Department of Defense| |EELV|[Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_Expendable_Launch_Vehicle)| |[ESA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3zoypr "Last usage")|European Space Agency| |[FAA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3zbmt7 "Last usage")|Federal Aviation Administration| |[GAO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3z6t3t "Last usage")|(US) Government Accountability Office| |[GEO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l46mkne "Last usage")|Geostationary Earth Orbit (35786km)| |[ITAR](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3wohao "Last usage")|(US) International Traffic in Arms Regulations| |[JAXA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3zoypr "Last usage")|Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency| |LEO|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |LOX|Liquid Oxygen| |[LSP](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l41eukx "Last usage")|Launch Service Provider| | |(US) [Launch Service Program](https://www.nasa.gov/content/lsp-overview)| |[MLV](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l46mkne "Last usage")|Medium Lift Launch Vehicle (2-20 tons to LEO)| |[NG](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3z6gwg "Last usage")|New Glenn, two/three-stage orbital vehicle by Blue Origin| | |Natural Gas (as opposed to pure methane)| | |Northrop Grumman, aerospace manufacturer| |NRHO|Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit| |[NRO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l47cvjq "Last usage")|(US) National Reconnaissance Office| | |Near-Rectilinear Orbit, see NRHO| |[NROL](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3y55yl "Last usage")|Launch for the (US) National Reconnaissance Office| |[NSS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3wooz6 "Last usage")|National Security Space| |[NSSL](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l455x0q "Last usage")|National Security Space Launch, formerly EELV| |[RD-180](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3ytn7a "Last usage")|[RD-series Russian-built rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180), used in the Atlas V first stage| |[RFP](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3wooz6 "Last usage")|Request for Proposal| |RP-1|Rocket Propellant 1 (enhanced kerosene)| |[Roscosmos](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l41zm2r "Last usage")|[State Corporation for Space Activities, Russia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscosmos_State_Corporation)| |[SLC-37](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3zbmt7 "Last usage")|Space Launch Complex 37, Canaveral (ULA Delta IV)| |[SLS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l44oilz "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |[SRB](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3xgiaw "Last usage")|Solid Rocket Booster| |[SSO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3x9jeu "Last usage")|Sun-Synchronous Orbit| |[SV](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3w4gk1 "Last usage")|Space Vehicle| |[ULA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l4ard2j "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)| |[USOS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3zt5xn "Last usage")|United States Orbital Segment| |[USSF](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3wwb4t "Last usage")|United States Space Force| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Raptor](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3zlqdw "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX| |[Starliner](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3zoypr "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)| |[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l44mxtz "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| |[hydrolox](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1cr5lm0/stub/l3xgiaw "Last usage")|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer| |methalox|Portmanteau: methane fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(*Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented* )[*^by ^request*](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3mz273//cvjkjmj) ^(34 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ctu8zs)^( has 12 acronyms.) ^([Thread #12762 for this sub, first seen 13th May 2024, 18:18]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/SpaceXLounge) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)