ULA Hits Back at SpaceX & Musk, Sees No Interruptions in Russian Engine Deliveries
Launch of Atlas V with NROL-33 satellite from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on May 22, 2014. (Credit: ULA)
ULA has begun to hit back SpaceX and its founder Elon Musk after weeks of criticism. The Washington Post reports:
In a meeting with reporters Wednesday, Michael Gass, the head of United Launch Alliance, met critics’ questions about its reliance on Russian-made engines head on, saying it would begin to develop its own engine in conjunction with several other firms. And he targeted Musk’s SpaceX, saying it was trying to “cut corners” and taking a “dangerous approach” to entering the national security launch business.
The counterattack by ULA, which is made up of defense giants Lockheed Martin and Boeing, includes a media campaign designed to showcase the firm’s long-held dominance in the field of space flight and highlight what it calls “results over rhetoric.”
“The whole tenor of the campaign is to make perfectly clear that there is a lot at stake when it comes to successful space launches — literally lives are at stake,” Gass said. “We also want to make clear that there is a big distinction between a company that has a 100-year combined heritage in successfully delivering satellites into orbit and a company that is not yet even certified to conduct one [national security] launch.”
[….]
“SpaceX is trying to cut corners and just wants the USAF to rubber stamp it,” Gass said. “SpaceX’s view is just ‘trust us.’ We obviously think that’s a dangerous approach and, thankfully, so do most people.”
Gass accused SpaceX of wanting the U.S. Air Force to “rubber stamp it” to compete for defense launches before the service complete certification of the Falcon 9 launcher, which is expected later this year. He also called SpaceX’s appeal to set aside the USAF’s decision to bulk buy of 36 ULA Atlas V and Delta IV rocket cores “baseless.”
Gass told reporters that despite a threat by Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin to cut off exports of the RD-180 engine, ULA expects deliveries to continue on schedule. There have been no indications that Russia will follow through on threat. The engine powers the first stage of ULA’s Atlas V engine.
Meanwhile, ULA has embarked on an effort to replace the engine with a U.S. developed motor. Earlier this week, the company announced a series of contracts with engine providers for initial work toward a replacement.
23 responses to “ULA Hits Back at SpaceX & Musk, Sees No Interruptions in Russian Engine Deliveries”
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To paraphrase Gass, “Continue to feed me your tax dollars or risk your young” and then continues “We are the best and we will always be the best because you must not give anyone else a chance to beat us unless you want to risk your young”.
Any time there’s new disruptive technology or business practices (i.e. Progress) the old entrenched interests fight back. They’ll go to their congressmen and senators, cajole and threaten and probably get their way if there isn’t strong support from else where. You can tell this isn’t good for the country because instead of saying “OK. we’re going to change and compete (see Ariane) on the market they try to keep the competition from even being able to bid on the work. That’s not free market. That’s monopoly.
I really have no dog in this fight and I can recognize crap when I hear it. ULA’s position is about what I would expect from a group concerned that the new guy is going to take some of its business away. They do make one good point, however, Musk has been trying to pressure the AF to certify his vehicle before the process is finished. Elon needs to shut up and jump through whatever hoops he needs to in order to get Falcon 9 certified. Part of this is launching successfully and on time. I’m sure that his customers are all in favor of his (r)evolutionary approach to delivery systems – as long as he meets his contractual requirements.
“Musk has been trying to pressure the AF to certify his vehicle before the process is finished.”
He’s been very explicit that this is NOT what he’s after. They’ve done the required flights and are working through the paperwork to complete the certification. SpaceX’s complaint is about the bulk buy being pushed through just in time to exclude them from competing for any of the launches.
That’s a subtle difference. “Please wait to place your order until I am ready to serve you.” “Oh, you’re not going to wait? Unfair!” There were national security flights before SpaceX existed and there will be more after they are certified. SpaceX is not going to go out of business because they missed out on the last bulk buy. They currently have more satellite business than they can keep up with and they will undoubtedly be a major player in the manned launch business regardless of the system that NASA chooses for commercial crew.
Personally, I think that if Dragon/Falcon 9 isn’t selected, the NASA IG should be working overtime. Still, he needs to stop bitching and fly his contracted payloads on schedule. Performance now will go farther towards winning national security payloads than all the griping and tweets and lawsuits and other rants he and his disciples care to generate.
Terry, that is not really true. Musk is saying that the gov. has never given a massive multi-year contract like this without competition. The fact that competition is right on the edge, it is really not right that this happens.
And now, ULA and the GOP wants funding for a new engine in which we taxpayers pay for their engine.
In fact, musk has a good point about all of this. Basically, his argument is that this new contract should be null and void since competition is right around the corner.
BTW, something that few have talked about is the fact that Russia COULD actually subvert the engines. Russia has threatened to withhold the engines, but, the reality is, that they could decide instead to harm the engine and have it quietly blow up the atlas or have even a small failure.
So, the point is, that the argument that we can depend on Russia for engines has to be one of the worst ideas going. And if that is the case, then this contract is a horrible idea.
What is sad is that this contract is indicative of where America is heading.
CONgress, along with the USAF, is pushing us to be dependent on a nation that the GOP, along with the USAF, calls an enemy. And in light of Russia’s current massing on Ukraine’s border, I think that we should have concerns. Yet, the USAF continues to push this, while the GOP continues to block SpaceX from not only the USAF, but also hard at work trying to stop SpaceX from doing human launch to the ISS.
You can look at this from the point of view of the hard done by SpaceX or you could look at this from the point of view of the hard done by US taxpayer.
SpaceX have offered a price of $80 for a F9 USAF mission. Presumably FH would be more but probably less than $240M. So, even at $80 million per core, SpaceX could have fulfilled the 36 cores at under $3 billion. ULA have charged over $10.5 billion and without the bulk buy “discount” it would have been $4.4 billion more, nearly $15 billion. Basically ULA have used pricing as an abuse of their (shortly to end) monopoly position to blackmail/bribe the USAF into giving them a bulk contract, so as to shut out competition for a few more years.
You say you have no dog in this fight, I’m in the UK, so it might appear that neither do I. But that is not true, we both do, and it is fair play, it is a stand against corruption on a billion dollar scale, it is the continuing delay of improvements in space flight technology and a space faring future for humanity.
“Elon needs to shut up and jump through whatever hoops he needs to in order to get Falcon 9 certified.”
From what I’ve read, neither the Delta IV nor the Atlas V had to be certified. If that’s true, then why should SpaceX have to jump through a lot of hoops that Boeing and Lockheed (now ULA) didn’t? SpaceX should be held to the same standard as ULA.
Looking at the Delta IV launch history, it carried a government payload (DSCS-III military communications satellite) on its second launch. This was despite the fact that it was a completely new design with the only thing in common with prior Delta rockets being the name. The first Delta IV Heavy did carry a demonstration payload but the second one carried an expensive government payload.
From what I could find, the Atlas V did carry a number of commercial payloads before launching its first government payload.
Irrelevant. The certification process exists now and that is the reality that SpaceX (and any other company looking to fly national security payloads) must deal with. I don’t hate SpaceX but I also wouldn’t cut them any slack where proof of quality and reliability is concerned in the name of “fairness” or “free enterprise.”
Is ULA willing to use their own money to develop a new engine or are they expecting the taxpayers to pay for it? Since ULA gets almost all of its money from taxpayers, I think I know the answer.
It’s really easy to kick the big guy and make heroes out of the little “entrepreneurs” but all of these companies have stuck their hands out asking for taxpayer funding at some point. I would think it prudent of ULA to find a domestic engine for their Atlas V and I share your discomfort with asking the taxpayer to pay to design it, develop it, build it, test it and then keep paying for it as part of the rocket. This a development cost that ULA should be bearing but of course we know that all costs are passed on to the ultimate consumer anyway. So I guess we can pay for it at the front end or pay more for it at the back end.
While SpaceX has received some NASA money, they’ve spent a great deal of their own money to develop their rockets, engines and capsules. I don’t like having the government give money to primarily benefit one company (ULA) in competition with private enterprise.
ULA is subsidized to the tune of a billion dollars a year (just because) in addition to the high prices paid for their rockets. Let them use some of that money to pay for the development of a new engine.
Last time I checked, Boeing Corp and Lockheed-Martin Corp were publicly traded companies owned by their shareholders. So how is it that they are competing with “private enterprise?” Nobody gives ULA (and, like I said below, I really have no dog in this fight) money for nothing. Elon has spent some of his own money, but he can because he owns the company. You don’t really have any idea if or how much money ULA has invested in anything. I don’t either but I do know that the government doesn’t just give away money because they support “free enterprise.” If they send money to ULA (or SpaceX or Sierra Nevada) they expect something in return.
If the US government pays for the development of a new engine for use by ULA, it’d be like them paying to develop a new car engine and only letting GM use it. That’s crony capitalism. If Boeing, Lockheed, or ULA need a new engine, let them pay for it. Or, if a rocket engine company wants to develop a new engine, let them pay for it. Why should SpaceX or any other company have to compete against companies getting heavy subsidies?
Larry, this is a tempest in a teapot. I basically agree with you that the American taxpayer should not be subsidizing private industry. That applies to ULA, SpaceX, Sierra Nevada and the rest of what you call “private enterprise.” NASA should tell the companies what they will require and “private industry” should raise the capital themselves to create an acceptable product if they wish to compete for the service contract. That will leave NASA free to deal with SLS/Orion or any other boondoggle that Congress shoves down their collective throats.
Of course, we know that won’t happen. Without the carrot of public funds to be had in the short term to offset development costs, most of these companies can’t afford the costs associated with research and development. As to a replacement engine for the RD-180, ULA doesn’t make rocket engines. It has to buy them. Presumably, Aerojet or whatever company makes the actual engine will be more than willing to sell them to SpaceX or OSC (they want RD-180’s as well) or anybody else that can use them and is willing to pay for them. The Russians didn’t create the RD-180 with Atlas V in mind and whoever creates the new engine will be looking to create one as good as or superior to the RD-180. The RD-180 is the benchmark, not the rocket it is going into.
Yes, Aerojet will likely build the engines but they want a lot of tax money to develop it. Meanwhile, SpaceX is using their own money to develop their engines. This puts them at a disadvantage (it’s hard to compete against ‘free money’) but they’re so efficient they’re still beating the old companies.
To go back to my auto engine analogy, suppose government researchers developed a new, efficient car engine but only let one auto company use it (and without them having to pay for it). All other auto makers have to spend a lot of money on engine R&D, so the company that gets the government design has a competitive advantage. They could sell their cars cheaper (or earn higher profits) because they don’t have to recoup their R&D costs.
There’s very little chance that SpaceX would use the Aerojet engine. Rocket engines can’t be swapped out like Lego blocks – the entire rocket is designed around the engines. SpaceX would have to scrap their successful Falcon 9 to use the Aerojet engine. Since the proposed engine is significantly more powerful than the Merlin D, it’s likely it can’t be throttled to low enough thrust to allow for landing, so SpaceX would have to abandon their goal of recovering and reusing rocket stages. They’d be dependent on an outside supplier which would significantly drive up their costs. In other words, they’d become just another rocket company and just as expensive as the others.
“Since the proposed engine is significantly more powerful than the Merlin D, it’s likely it can’t be throttled to low enough thrust to allow for landing, so SpaceX would have to abandon their goal of recovering and reusing rocket stages.”
This is really the point – if you can’t land the stage, then the engine is useless, because the rocket is useless. Using an auto analogy, it would be like Ford building a brand new engine to use in the Model-T. The moment an F9 first stage touches down on land, every other rocket becomes a dinosaur.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite…
” This excludes the $1 billion dollars of annual capability and readiness funding received by ULA.”
What is that funding? Could it be in the nature of a retainer – something to assure that the U.S. government goes to the head of any line when necessary? It sounds kind of wasteful to me but it still is not “money for nothing.” It would be a shame if a national security payload had to be delayed for contractual reasons because the only available Atlas V or Delta IV was being used to launch Sirius XM’s latest satellite.
Considering that only 9 of the atlas launches have been commercial, of which the last one was over 5 years ago,
and only the first 1 of Delta IV was commercial,
I think that we can agree that is not an issue.
That fact is, that the 1B was given to them when they formed. Both Boeing and L-Mart said that they could not survive, so USAF sweetened the pot and gave them 1B/year.
Yup, just that 1B / year subsidy is more money than what NASA and DOD has spent on getting COTS and now CCxDev going. Amazing, is it not?
I’ll concede your point, Windbourne. 🙂
There are some engines that I not heard of around 1million lbs. thrust. Northrup-Grumman did some work for NASA on one.
Northrop Grumman Corp., which designed a 1.1-million-pound thrust engine for NASA more than a decade ago, provided input to the Pentagon’s propulsion panel led by Gen. Mitchell, according to Bob Bishop, a company spokesperson.
Bishop declined comment on the status of the specific engine concept designed for NASA, known as the TR-107.
One contender for the new U.S.-produced propulsion system is the AR-1 engine by Aerojet Rocketdyne, which manufactures the RS-68 hydrogen-fueled main engine for ULA’s Delta 4 rocket.
Aerojet Rocketdyne officials have said they aim to sell two of the 500,000-pound-thrust kerosene-fueled engines for $25 million per pair. Would that work? How much of a launch cost is the engines? ULA had a study one time on ejecting the engines and recovering them.
I checked the A-R site and there is nothing about the AR-1 engine. If true and they already have a price, then it is far along. Or they may be fishing for down payments. The money Congress wants to put out on a new engine, it could buy 20 of these engines for testing.
The AR-1 is a proposed 2,200 kilonewtons (500,000 lbf)-class thrust kerosene/LOX rocket engine that Aerojet Rocketdyne proposed in 2014 to “lobby the government to fund an all-new, U.S.-sourced rocket propulsion system.” Aerojet’s early projection, as of June 2014, is that the cost of the each engine, not including the up to US$1 billion estimated development cost to be funded by the government, would be under US$25 million per pair of engines. Well, at least 1/4 of the development cost in one year anyway.
Do we want a custom-made suit or one off the rack?
If we opt for the custom-made suit, who gets to design it?
If buying one off the rack is “disruptive,” is that a bad thing?
How is buying one of the rack not a transparent transaction?
Please.