Can an aerospace dinosaur learn new tricks?
United Launch Alliance (ULA) believes so, and thinks its Vulcan rocket is proof.
We’ll see.
ULA is a grotesquerie straight out of Eisenhower’s farewell address. The LLC traces its origin to the early 1990s. Back then, the military’s space-launch needs kept growing, but no dynamic marketplace for orbital rockets existed. (The shuttle — industrial policy at it worst — was partly to blame, as was NASA’s paranoid efforts to strangle any entity that threatened to encroach on its turf.)
As congressional auditors explained, the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program “started in 1995 when DOD awarded contracts to four companies for preliminary launch vehicle system designs; at that time, DOD’s acquisition strategy was to select the one company with the most cost-effective design.” Hopes ran high that the tech boom would foster a renaissance in domestic rockets seeking to provide transportation for global constellations such as Teledesic and SkyBridge, and along the way, the military could “leverage economies of scale in a market-driven cost environment.”
Didn’t happen. The dot-com eruption fizzled, taking with it satellite-based Internet for the masses. By 2002, when the EELV-subsidized Delta IV (Boeing) and Atlas V (Lockheed Martin) made their maiden flights, commercial customers were scant. (And rivals abroad, including Europe’s Ariane and Russia’s Proton, dominated the field.) But since payloads for missile tracking, communications, positioning, etc. were as necessary as ever, demand from the Pentagon did not wither. So Congress generously agreed to fund the Delta IV and Atlas V with “firm-fixed-price” contracts and “cost-plus-incentive-fee” arrangements dubbed “launch capability contracts.”
Maddeningly, two forms of compensation weren’t enough for Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Former ULA executive George Sowers, now on the faculty of the Colorado School of Mines, described what happened next:
After a few years of hemorrhaging, both companies told the government, “Unless something changes, we’re done.” The solution that was cooked up in the smoke-filled rooms was, well, you know, we don’t want one or the other of you to pull out; we kind of like the idea of two independent systems. Let’s keep them both and put them under one tent.
Thus, in 2006 Boeing and Lockheed Martin merged their operations. The Federal Trade Commission warned that United Launch Alliance was “likely to cause significant anticompetitive harm,” but when “national security” is “at stake,” dissenters get ignored.
In Rocket Billionaires, Tim Fernholz summarized where things stood a decade and a half ago: “[T]he US military got the guaranteed access to space that it wanted, but the space program itself was stagnant. The government offered little incentive for ULA to become more efficient, and the organization saw little reason to compete for private launches or to develop new technology.” In 2015, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the EELV program’s unit cost has exceeded initial projections by 270 percent.
Fortunately, taxpayers had a champion in their corner — a native South African with vision and guts, who seethed over EELV’s outrageous expenditures. In 2014, Elon Musk filed a lawsuit challenging the Pentagon-ULA coziness, and within a couple of years, his company had muscled its way into the mix. The monopoly enjoyed by the Delta IV and Atlas V was over. SpaceX’s Falcon 9, now the busiest and safest launch vehicle in the world, regularly conducts missions for the DOD.
In what was surely a coincidence, not long after ULA received a heavy dose of tough love via competition, the pricey Delta IV and Atlas V were scheduled for retirement. Their replacement is Vulcan. ULA claims that the vehicle “will provide higher performance and greater affordability while continuing to deliver … unmatched reliability and precision.”
Vulcan’s first flight was planned for 2019. Nope. The inaugural liftoff won’t occur until later this year. (Probably.) But ULA can’t be entirely blamed for the delay — in 2018, the company picked Blue Origin to build the rocket’s main engine, and Jeff Bezos’s firm has underperformed.
Can Vulcan be a player in the burgeoning launch market? Anyone who’s studied the success of SpaceX has deep doubts. The game-changer’s employees are not unionized, and their work ethic and innovativeness is legendary. Musk’s onetime startup is maniacally focused on cutting costs (in-house manufacturing is the rule), and brave enough to contest inane NASA/DOD regulations and habits if there’s a chance to achieve savings. Does that resemble the way Boeing and Lockheed Martin do “business”?
It’s wrong to wish failure on Vulcan. It is. But given the billions of dollars ULA has harvested from hardworking (and unsuspecting) Americans, rooting for catastrophe is merely a venial sin.