USAF Awards ULA Contract for Atlas V Launches
LOS ANGELES (DOD PR) — United Launch Services, Centennial, Colorado, has been awarded a $98,549,235 firm-fixed-price contract for Atlas V Completion launch services.
This contract provides launch service completion for three National Security Space Launch Atlas V missions (two Air Force and one National Reconnaissance Office) previously ordered under contract FA8811-13-C-0003.
Work will be performed at Centennial, Colorado; Decatur, Alabama; and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, and is expected to be completed by Nov. 30, 2020. This award is the result of a sole source acquisition.
Fiscal 2019 and 2020 procurement funds are being obligated at the time of award. The Space and Missile Systems Center, Los Angeles Air Force Base, California, is the contracting activity.
26 responses to “USAF Awards ULA Contract for Atlas V Launches”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Got to feed the good old dinosaurs a bit longer.
Corporate welfare. I say if the government is going keep these guys going forever we should have some sort of public representation on the corporate board.
If I read that right, it comes out to a bit under $33M per launch,. I must be misunderstanding something.
I was going to ask the same question. I’m assuming since it’s ULA it’s $98 mil per flight.
I suspect the key phrase in the presser is “launch service completion.” Not sure just what that means as a government contracting term of art, but most probably it means this is a final payment for launches that have been partly paid for previously.
im pretty sure that this is the same set-up as the Deltas. The DOD paid for these launchers at reduced rates, so compete against SX. BUT, I think that ULA wanted more money for these, so the DoD agreed, but to keep it legal, they now declare the original contract was JUST FOR THE ROCKET. NOTHING MORE. And now, since ULA is the only company that can launch them, the DOD just gave them all sorts of excess money to launch of these.
I am going to guess that BO, maybe SX, or perhaps both together, will take this to court and cause a LOT OF ISSUES for somebody.
I don’t know you’re right, but I certainly can’t say you’re wrong either. Federal contracting anent the legacy majors is kind of the definition of non-transparent.
Offer 10% of costs saved as bonuses to the people in the procurement departments and see what happens to cost. I can hear the screams even before hitting the post button. I think $30B in bonuses to cut $300B in costs would be quite interesting. And jail any people that accept inferior quality .
Hard to see how that could work any more badly than what we’re already stuck with. It would certainly invert the current perverse incentives. I’d probably cap the “bounties” at 100% of base pay annually in total and 10% of base pay for any given economy achieved. That would encourage the castingof a wide net for modest savings and discourage looking for one big score at the expense of other smaller ones. It would also limit the incentives for reverse corruption from the procurers to the producers.
thats about right…the payload is probably worth 5 to 8 times that
its “finish the launch” cost
It not for the launch, it’s for some add-on money (“Completion launch services”) for each previously contracted launch
So in addition to the extant customary graft, we should also be awarding directors fees to Sen. Shelby and his cohorts? Methinks that does not constitute an improvement to the current less than delightful state of affairs.
It works in Europe very well. It ensures the company is subservient to the government and not the other way around. These companies perform very well on the international marketplace and make good product. I hate to say it, but America’s model of private enterprise acting as independent players is going to be supplanted by Japanese/Chinese/European state sponsored business with winners and losers chosen. Many American companies like Apple and even Tesla have already bowed to Chinese demands for production in country, and local partnerships with technology transfer. It’s not a surrender by the US government. Its a surrender by the American business sector. We need to figure out how to do state sponsored enterprise here as our before our model of doing business is blown away by immortal foreign competition. If we want to put up a real fight, then the private sector needs to figure out how to compete against state sponsored immortals overseas. I see none of that going on at all except Donny Two Scoops half arsed attempts.
Tesla has NOT bowed to China. Airbus, Boeing, GE, GM, Ford, BMW, Dahmler, German Government with their maglev, etc have all bowed to China. Tesla REFUSED to have a partner, let alone give them their secrets. Tesla’s real secrets are NOT the EV, but the manufacturing. And in Tesla’s case, they are sending in only the lowest end of their model 3/Y and will be using Cells produced by other companies based in China. Oddly, LG is the first, but only with cells made in China.
Tesla will NOT be making their cells in China, nor will they be making any of the real IP there.
BUT, I agree with the rest of what you wrote. Western Companies are bowing to China just to sell a few things but are then losing EVERYTHING. GE, Airbus, and Transrapid are the best examples of this.
Bill Gates was going to join. Heck, as Great Point Energy what they think of working with China.
But Tesla? Tesla is being smart about it.
I laughed when someone said … “
Tesla’s real secrets are NOT the EV, but the manufacturing”…. Hate to tell you, Gigafactory 3 is in China. Guess who’s going to work there and learn the whole darn system? It won’t be long for Chinese made components to start leaking into American factories. It will just make too much business sense. When Uncle Lee pays for everything, business men come running…. They can’t resist.
Which is why Tesla is not putting whole system . They are doing low-end M3/Y.
They’re doing that not for reasons of IP protection – which Tesla doesn’t basically care much about anyway – but mainly because those low-end models will be the big sellers in China as they are here and elsewhere. Tesla’s higher-end vehicles also have a market in China – albeit a smaller one – which Tesla satisfies via export from its U.S. factory and will continue to do. Allowing Tesla to do some non-trivial exporting from the U.S. to China is another part of Tesla’s somewhat unique modus vivendi with the Chinese regime.
Uncle Lee? I resemble that remark 🙂
I guess “Lee” is a cultural, ethnic, gender, and orientation neutral word. 🙂
While likely true to some extent, Tesla might become a sought after “halo” brand in China, so they’ll make money there regardless.
Tesla is sort of an odd duck anent the Chinese. It patents all its EV tech, but also makes all its patents effectively public domain as its goal is not simply to make money building electric cars but to catalyze even more such production by others. Because China is far from self-sufficient in domestic energy production, it is especially eager to pursue means of achieving cuts in its need for petroleum imports. Electric cars are a big part of that strategy so Tesla – unlike most U.S. corporations lured to China with phony promises of access to the Chinese domestic market – is actually going to get access to the Chinese domestic market in a big way. Tesla’s interests aren’t the same as those of the Chinese regime, but they’re sufficiently parallel to make Tesla a nearly unique exception to China’s general policies toward U.S. companies doing business there.
Regardless of the Chinese oil deficiency, the apocalyptic level of air pollution of Chinese cities makes a good case for electric transportation.
Yeah. Even the plutocrats and Party bosses in China like to breathe.
You have an odd notion of what “works well” means. The space launch business, as an instructive example, was the exclusive province of governments and state-owned companies until SpaceX came along. And it was also a static backwater both technologically and economically. Enter some creative destruction instigated by SpaceX and space launch has become a real business again.
The Chinese state-owned business sector has been a financial albatross for decades. All of the economic advancement China has achieved since Mao died is due to allowing market-based business to flourish. That advance would be even more impressive if China had let the state-owned dinosaurs die instead of propping them up with profits derived from the actually successful Chinese private sector.
The performance of the Japanese and European economies have also lagged that of the U.S. for decades. European practice is to put union reps on company boards as “public” representation rather than politicians, per se, but the effect is similar. Labor is far less mobile in Europe than in the U.S. and the institutional privileging of established businesses makes it much harder for entrepreneurial startups both to form and to grow to the point where they can disrupt somnolent business sectors that need shaking up. The main reason European companies still do as well as they do is that they sell much of their output in the U.S. and even make a lot of it here via off-shoring manufacturing operations.
The Chinese success in suckering and squeezing American business has been greatest during the era of dysfunctional corporate tax policy instigated and defended by Democrats. It has also been most successful in the ranks of old-line U.S. companies, exactly the sorts of firms that would benefit most from encasing the American economy in amber as the socialist left currently seeks to do and eliminating all these pesky, disruptive entrepreneurs.
amazing
This story would make more sense if we were told how much ULA had already been awarded for these three launches “previously ordered under contract FA8811-13-C-0003.” Anyone know ?
Did the original contract specify the amounts for launch service completion ?