Military Smallsat Launch Contracts Withdrawn, Future Remains Uncertain
Easy come, uneasy go.
Last month, the Department of Defense announced it would award two rideshare launch contracts apiece to Aevum, Astra, Rocket Lab, Space Vector, X-BOW and Virgin Orbit’s subsidiary VOX Space.
Earlier this month, however, the contract awards were withdrawn so the $116 million in funding could be used for other priorities. The money came from the Defense Production Act, which is designed to help companies struggling financially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
C4ISRnet quotes Will Roper, Air Force’s assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, as saying the contracts could be awarded again.
“My hope is that whenever there’s new [Defense Production Act] Title 3 funding or when resource frees up due to other efforts not executing as planned, that those [contracts] are the first to go back into the hopper,” Roper told reporters Tuesday.
“If I were asked today to put in one new Title 3 initiative, it’s small launch because I think it’s going to be an amazing industry base for this country, and if properly influenced, my military mission can be highly disruptive in future war fighting, especially if satellites can be put up in a very responsive way that changes the calculus for holding space assets at risk.”
Of the six companies, only Rocket Lab has launched satellites into orbit. Astra has failed in several launch attempts. The maiden flight of Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne failed in late May.
Aevum, Space Vector and X-BOW have not made any orbital launch attempts.
2 responses to “Military Smallsat Launch Contracts Withdrawn, Future Remains Uncertain”
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This is exactly why Elon Musk is building Starlink, to create a solid revenue stream for SpaceX directly from consumer services. Then SpaceX will be free of the whims of government contractors and Congressional funding. It will only need to deal with regulatory issues and if they become too burdensome he will just relocate to a foreign nation without it. Yes, ITAR is a barrier, but it’s possible to overcome it.
I don’t foresee Elon ever needing to go full John Galt. To this point, regulations and regulators have been, at worst, minor annoyances. As SpaceX – and Tesla and Musk’s other enterprises – continue to grow in size and influence, regulatory bothers can only be rationally expected to decrease.
Case in point, all the nail-biting in these forums earlier this year anent potential endless FAA launch licensing delays and possible micromanagement of the SH-Starship test program. Then the FAA came through with a nearly open-ended suborbital launch license. The same Nervous Nellies are at it again, now, anent the underway re-do of the Boca Chica environmental impact statement. I’m not seeing any potential serious roadblocks on that score.
But Starlink certainly is key. NASA’s own study of SpaceX’s F9 and Dragon 1 development showed it to have been a minimum factor of four and a likely factor of 10 times more monetarily efficient than NASA and legacy contractors would have been if assigned the same tasks. So, for SpaceX to reach a point where it is capable, on its own, of equaling the entirety of NASA’s net accomplishments per year, Starlink only has to provide a net revenue stream of $2.5 to $5.5 billion per year – most probably a sum in the lower end of that range. SpaceX should be able to achieve this by the mid-2020s, perhaps even sooner. Any net above this level simply means SpaceX accomplishes more in a given year than NASA.