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SpaceX Launch Achieves Geostationary Transfer Orbit
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket this afternoon in a bid to deliver a large commercial satellite into geostationary orbit. The flight was successful: "Approximately 185 seconds into flight, Falcon 9’s second stage’s single Merlin vacuum engine ignited to begin a five minute, 20 second burn that delivered the SES-8 satellite into its parking orbit. Eighteen minutes after injection into the parking orbit, the second stage engine relit for just over one minute to carry the SES-8 satellite to its final geostationary transfer orbit. The restart of the Falcon 9 second stage is a requirement for all geostationary transfer missions." This is a significant milestone for SpaceX, and it fulfills another of the three objectives set forth by the U.S. Air Force to certify SpaceX flights for National Security Space missions.
The United Launch Alliance, at its heart, is just a way for Boeing and Lockheed to monopolize the defense launch market and then charge whatever the hell prices they want. Having at least one competitor in the space is important, if you as a taxpayer don't like getting ripped off.
Yes, yes, whatever.
The United States relies too much on ULA for its space-launch, ULA has easily raised its price and the tax-payers ended up having to cough up the dough.
FTFY. This is the first commercial satellite launched in the US since November 23, 2009 when Intelsat 14 launched on an Atlas V from LC-41.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
> What if one day Russia or Iran or China ends up owning SpaceX ?
What if one day large corporations could pay-off american politicians, on a large and wide scale, with many people knowing it happens. And those people end up determining how the country is run?
We both know that already happens, and *this* is what your worried about?
What does it even matter if Russia or the Chinese own SpaceX, they dont, but who cares. They have their own space agencies... ones that actually still operate.
that existing space providers are in big trouble.
Even the Chinese are quaking in their boots, as they can't do it as cheaply as SpaceX. And EADS is frantically redesigning their new Ariane 6 to try to be more cost competitive with the Falcon.
SpaceX has completely rocked the space industry upside down, and A LOT of naysayers need to eat crow now. As recently as 2012 (see this article), managers at NASA were poo-pooing Elon saying rockets are hard and noobs shouldn't try.
Doubtful. For services of this kind, who else is able to pay and needs these services? There are a few, but losing US contracts would kill them.
This is more akin to the mutually beneficial relationship between China and US sovereign debt. Sure, they could divest, but *where*, exactly, would they get a safer investment vehicle? The only reason one party would pull out is for non-economic reasons, because it sure isn't beneficial to do so.
No one wins if SpaceX starts trying to milk the US too hard. And in the end, the US government could always play the national security card with the IP and incubate another company or bring it back inhouse.
What's the alternative? The majority extorting funds from the minority?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I have no idea why the NSA/USAF requirements is such a big deal, as it really doesn't have much of anything to do with a private company (in this case SES... an operator of GEO telecommunications satellites) is spending its money on another private company (SpaceX) to accomplish an otherwise very public mission. People are going to be pointing their satellite dishes at this satellite for crying out loud and watching television coming from it. I don't know how more public you can make such a flight.
The USAF is simply throwing up some BS that SpaceX needs to fly a few more missions and prove it can deliver satellites into various kinds of orbits before they are able to tell Boeing and Lockheed-Martin lobbyists where to go when the next round of launch contracts come out. Those two companies (in the form of the United Launch Alliance... jointly owned by both companies) want to pretend they are the only people in America capable of launching anything into orbit at all.
The media is totally biased in its coverage... the old-space industry launches satellites all the time. Yet, when SpaceX does it, there is an endless stream of news articles announcing the fact. When will the media stop ganging up and play fair?
Media bias is spread thin and fair all across the political spectrum, from Fox to Msnbc to Al Jazeera... Any point of view can be propagandized these days. Say what you will about America, the press is still quite free.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Wow, who do you work for? Lockheed Martin? Boeing? The US has plenty contractors on hand for cost-plus contracts. And if all else fails I'm sure ESA would give you Ariane rockets for a price. And worst case if everyone had collective amnesia you should be able to pull off an Apollo program much faster and cheaper today than in the 60s. And when it really comes down to it the real "space" war is still 99% ICBMs, which I doubt the military will forget how to make. The ISS isn't exactly critical defense infrastructure.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
And that would be different than having Boeing build rockets and planes and so on, how exactly?
Even in your crazy scenarios there are a bunch of obvious options:
The US denies the sale to Russia or Iran or China - just like they have always done with sales and mergers that impact national security.
The US nationalizes SpaceX.
The US dusts off its old NASA stuff and goes from there.
SpaceX could easily raise its price 100-fold and the tax-payers will end up having to cough up the dough.
What the heck are you talking about? Why would Boing or Lockheed (the current owners of the US govt launch monopoly) be and different? How is *more* competition from SpaceX going to lead to price increases and fewer options?
What if one day Russia or Iran or China ends up owning SpaceX ?
And what if some day Russia or Iran of China owns General Dynamics, Lockheed, Honeywell, Northrup, etc? Then those companies will no longer be US defense contractors, and others will *happily* step up to take over their cushy multibillion dollar cost-overrun laden US military contracts. So it's a totally absurd concern that would be no different 30 years ago than it is today.
When your #1 customer spends more than the rest of the world combined, you don't piss them off.
When you accomplish something of this complexity for near half the price of the competition the media better be extolling the accomplishment.
Merlin vacuum engine ignited to begin a five minute, 20 second burn that delivered the SES-8
A 20 second burn that lasted 5 minutes - truly awesome.
If the private sector wants to compete, let it compete: in the private sector. Leave government work for the government.
Are you suggesting that Boeing and Lockheed are government agencies?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
No, he's suggesting that all government satellites be launched directly by the government.
You know, the way all government ground vehicles are built by the government, the way they make all their own computers, their own lightbulbs, their own paper, the way all government cafeteria food is grown by government workers.
I thought they were going to try controlled descents with each Falcon launch. Anyone see a reference to this? Couldn't find any news.
I believe what the AC is saying is that the government should design, build, and launch its own rockets rather than contracting out (and presumably design and build the satellites in-house also) and that without Boeing/Lockheed/TRW/etc. lobbying Congress to buy "necessary" satellites and the rockets to hang them up, there would be substantially fewer launches.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
You're being deliberately obtuse. Computers, lightbulbs, paper and cafeteria food are all commodities produced by companies who thrive from supplying a wide range of customers.
Lockheed in particular, and Boeing in great part, are doing custom round-trip design to deployment work often exclusively for the US government. There is no reason not to employ engineers directly, except (from a political PoV) ideological and (from a pragmatic PoV) that Uncle Sam is private business' bitch.
There is one similarity between Lockheed+Boeing and the businesses you list: all these enterprises began their work decades ago, using their own expertise. SpaceX started merely as a loss-making venture poaching ex-government and contractor employees, and taking government money - it really had nothing meritocratic to bring to the table.
(Also, "she".)
A day or so ago there was a discussion about whether amateurs could do real science. The consensus among professional researchers was that no amateur could do significant research without first getting an advanced degree.
One poster challenged the readers to give an example of an amateur scientist who had contributed in a meaningful way to an existing field of study.
Elon Musk has a BSc. in physics. Does this count?
(Or is this more engineering than science? Or maybe he's more of a bank-roller than a scientist?)
No, he's suggesting that all government satellites be launched directly by the government.
Once upon a time, thats how it used to be. Then a bunch of retards started screaming about it being a "waste of money" and other nonsense, and raped its budget. Now the US realistically has no space program, despite all the benefits, realized and potential.
SpaceX started merely as a loss-making venture poaching ex-government and contractor employees, and taking government money - it really had nothing meritocratic to bring to the table.
You call it poaching, I call it free job market. You call it "nothing meritocratic", I call it an exciting work environment. Work for legacy space transport providers is outright boring and mindnumbing, like work for any big corporation these days. SpaceX cares about their employees a bit more.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
But they are playing fair. The old-space industry is boring. I wouldn't want to work for them, and I'm sure many way more clever people than myself wouldn't work for a lazy corporate behemoth either. There's only so much fun to be had in a stuffy cubicle. I mean, heck, these days you can't even have a nice secretary to look at. Something is to be said for work conditions impacting the creativity, productivity and general willingness of the workforce to, you know, work there. The results - overpriced stuffiness - speak for themselves. I couldn't even fucking tell what ULA's mission is. With SpaceX, it's quite obvious: they want to innovate, they want to do it better and cheaper, and they want to reinvest the profits into bold new stuff nobody else has done before them. You don't need to read anything to know that - their actions stand on their own.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Yes, SpaceX is cheap, and yes, they could trivially match the Indian Mars probe price. You know how I know that? The Price Sheet says a Falcon 9 launch is $56.5 million. Leaving plenty of slack to build a little Mars probe. Considering a ULA launch costs literally 10 times as much, cheap is an understatement.
They've been profitable for 5 years and their price has never been higher than that. Since they're profitable, they're obviously not loss leaders. Why would it go up now? Especially considering SpaceX has already won the lucrative government contract that was available, namely Space Station resupply.
But no, the Chinese are not quaking in their boots. Long March rockets do cost more to build than Falcons, probably a lot more, but the Chinese don't care. They're building them for national pride, not customers, and they're damn well going to make absolutely certain they work, no matter how much it costs. They have to.
Near half? Closer to one tenth. A Falcon 9 costs $56.5 million. The last ULA launch cost $465 million. I don't know that the price difference is all that much of an accomplishment though. How hard is it to beat a bloated cost-plus military-industrial complex dinosaur that exists mainly as welfare for mediocre engineers? The short fabrication and assembly times, the incredibly short integration time, the miniscule size of the launch crew, all while conducting rocket surgery—now those are accomplishments worth extolling.
I am sure that the fact that India is manipulating their money relative to others has absolutely NOTHING to do with it (it SHOULD be about 30 rupee to $1, but it is 63 to $1). BTW, it was $74 million that was spent on it.
Likewise, MOM is a 1.3 metric tonne orbiting satellite, of which less than 15 kgs is devoted to the actual 5 simple instruments that were provided by other nations. Compare that to 2.5 tonnes maven with 65 kg devoted to 8 complex instruments, all produced in USA.
In addition, it is a near certainty that NASA's sat WILL work, while it is less than 33% chance of India's actually working.
And as to spaceX vs India, India's PSLV launches 3 tonnes into LEO at a costs of 17 million. SpaceX charges 56M for their falcon 9 which launches ~17 tonnes into LEO. So, SpaceX is already cheaper than India's most successful launch vehicle. However, SpaceX will be able to drop their f9 costs in half or more within 2 years due to grasshopper, and probably another 50% due to f9 and fh moving into heavy production.
Finally, India still does not have a successful mid-size launch system. Their GSLV has had more than a few issues, and that is with making heavy use of Russian tech and engineers.
quite sucking on gass.
They are all biased. The only way I know to counter that is to watch a diverse mix of media with a lot of different biases, and try to put together a composite picture of current events from all of them.
Most people simply pick a few media sources that are biased towards their own views, then dismiss all others as liars or a manipulative conspiracy.
SpaceX started merely as a loss-making venture poaching ex-government and contractor employees, and taking government money - it really had nothing meritocratic to bring to the table.
You call it poaching, I call it free job market. You call it "nothing meritocratic", I call it an exciting work environment. Work for legacy space transport providers is outright boring and mindnumbing, like work for any big corporation these days. SpaceX cares about their employees a bit more.
I'm pretty sure it's more a case of you'd have to do significant work to stop those employees from building rockets with company resources.
>
SpaceX started merely as a loss-making venture poaching ex-government and contractor employees, and taking government money - it really had nothing meritocratic to bring to the table.
Very good point. I'd just like to clarify two minor things...
1. I agree with you, that it is very easy to start a business putting stuff into space that makes money from the outset. There are plenty of real-life examples where real innovation is achieved without any requirement for up-front capital (loss-making business models), usually it's funded from initial sales.
I forget the example business models and companies.... can you remind me of them?
2. Prior to getting "poached" by SpaceX, which "really had nothing meritocratic to bring to the table.", there have been DECADES of intense innovation in the space industry thanks to an overwhelming support and encouragement from government. This intense innovation has been _so succesful_ that NASA have recently retired their last government owned space shuttles.
Elon Musk was just standing on the shoulders of giants by proposing the incremental innovation of having rockets land intact...
Wikipedia has let me down... are you able to point me in the direction of the space innovation that's recently come out of the US government organisations, making Space-X's work redundant?
(sarcasm is often lost in text, so let me be direct: IMHO, private companies like Space-X are facilitating innovation in space travel. This is their contribution to society. You can piss & moan because private people are making money out of it, but it's better than government money being wasted on useless bureaucracy supporting (or causing) scientists resting on their laurels.)
There's nothing economical about United Launch Alliance. There's only United Launch Cartel in my opinion.
Let's see it for what it is, a cartel and a jobs/pork barrel program.
If they succeed in landing all three stages for reuse as they plan, that will be the real game changer in terms of cost per launch.
I remember congress preventing middle eastern interest from purchasing a couple of east coast ports.
If they can prevent sale of ports, then why couldn't they prevent sale of a company that produces ITAR protected equipment ?
If the US govt can't be trusted to step in, then it can't be trusted for launching their rockets.
Because SpaceX is doing it without massive govt subsidies.
ULA rockets were developed with pork barrel money.
SpaceX designed and launched Falcon 1 with private money.
Then NASA stepped in with the CRS contract and helped Falcon 9 development, they invested less than a single Space Shuttle launch would have costed, and that investment more than paid itself with the 4 CRS launches to the ISS executed.
And BTW, SpaceX isn't NASA's sweetheart, they are COMPETING with Orbital Sciences, and Boeing is trying to get in too.
The difference is there are no money guarantees, you must meet contract requirements (goals) to get some money.
Moving forward, SpaceX is under contract to supply 5 or 6 Falcon 9 v1.1 + Dragon spacecraft for the cost of a single Space Shuttle launch !
And with the upgraded capabilities of Falcon 9 v1.1, they now will be able to cram a Dragon spacecraft with as much stuff as they can, the rocket can deliver it to the ISS while leaving fuel reserves to reuse the first stage.
Now that's cost effectiveness.
Trying to compare the lack of media coverage of ULA launches with the great coverage of a revolutionary, economical rocket like the Falcon 9, is truly unfair !
Come talk to me after ULA launches 3 or 4 commercial satellites !
... but about losing its cargo.
While SpaceX might be able to afford that (and perhaps even an insurance covers the loss of the launch vehicle _and_ the payload) the customer might not be in the position to replace it at all (or in a timely manner).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Agreed, but I see the news media's representation of political right, center, and left in a positive light. Perhaps the diversity of opinions available to subscribe to will keep the ditto-heads somewhat balanced, if never fair.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Maybe the idea of a self made guy building his own rocket company from the ground up and successfully competing against entrenched corporations makes for a compelling human interest story.
It sure as hell piques my interest.
More customers.
Yes, SpaceX wants to sell its products to as many people as it can. Funny thing is that ULA didn't need this kind of certification process when they tried to get the Atlas & Delta rockets certified for carrying USAF payloads. Yes, that is some time in the past, but they even had the federal government pay for early failures too. I find it all that more ironic that SpaceX has been able to build up its reputation and certify its rocket in spite of almost no subsidies to make that happen.
ULA must just be crapping in its shorts right now as any attempt to build a next generation rocket is going to be met at the Pentagon with "why don't you finance that vehicle like SpaceX has done"? In other words, they have real competition now.
As a side note: how many commercial satellite launches has ULA been able to send up this past year? I thought so and sort of proves the direction of the launch industry.
If I were launching a $300,000,000 payload on a rocket with fewer than a dozen launches, the insurance company is going to laugh me out of their office.
Happens all the time. The insurance company probably just charge you $100,000,000+ for insurance.
If your satellite is going to make you $1,000,000,000 a year and operate for twenty years. That's not a big deal.
that exists mainly as welfare for mediocre engineers?
Would you care to elaborate on or support this point? I find it is needlessly inflammatory and just downright rude. By what metric of engineering excellence are you using? Where are all the excellent rocket engineers working? Are the only good rocket engineers in the US working for SpaceX? Because the two 800 lb gorillas in the industry have a lock on the rocket launch business, one could argue that it is they who have the wherewithal to hire the best engineers.
Your examples are all very good, but I would take issue with your comparisons to the ridiculous cost of a Space Shuttle launch. SpaceX's budget would be orders of magnitude larger as well if they had to launch a payload that big with people on board.
Word.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Bottom line is STS was as much as ULA pork/jobs programs is today.
I wouldn't put up much of an argument on that point. However,the costs don't compare very well directly. If SpaceX also designed a human-compatible orbiter capable of reentry and providing life support for two week missions, and factor in the safety factors and all the extra regulations that comes with a manned mission, then their costs would go up significantly. If you got rid of the orbiter and converted it to a dead lift vehicle, then I imagine the STS costs would come down quite a bit. It isn't clear to me how well they'd compare. The comparisons with the Delta 4 is more straight-forward given that you're talking about payload mass and desired orbit.
wow. I had to read back a ways to discover how far off-topic we were...but yes indeed, I, too and also, think it's cool the rocket company is making headway. He is going to need some cred to fund the Hyperloop.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Do you work in the defense aerospace industry? Because the part I worked for boasted that it was white collar welfare. In the specific instance, what do you call an industry that is getting paid 10X what it should cost (as defined by what cost someone else to do it) to deliver something? I mean, if you paid fast food cashiers 72.50$/hr (10X minimum wage) simply becuase they work in a niche industry using revolving door lobbyists to gather no competition govt contracts, what would you call that? What if you paid market rate to 10X as many engineers as you should (using the definition of should, above) for the same reason? What if your "competition" and "you" were allowed to "merge" into an "alliance" (ULA) and then you jacked up the price on a mature, delivered product, what would you call that?
At least he didn't call it racketeering, or extortion, or bribery...which one could also argue....
He called it welfare.
As to the mediocre part, who in the fsck would ever work in a place like that? That's right, engineers who couldn't/can't get another job. As in, mediocre ones.
andy
I'm not talking about the cost argument, or the corporate welfare comments. I'm talking about the denigrating tone used with "mediocre engineers." So are you suggesting that if you're an excellent engineer who wants to work on some really cool shit like big-assed rockets and launching stuff into space (maybe that doesn't tickle your fancy, but some people think that is pretty cool stuff), and you can get a job doing that and get, by your estimate, paid 10 times what you could get doing some other engineering job, you're going to look at that and say, "you know, I don't like how that industry is set up and I'm going to leave this field and do something else."? Are you saying there were no decent engineers working there before around 2000, or that SpaceX sucked up all the excellent engineers and left only the mediocre ones behind? How many people are on the engineering staff at SpaceX? That was the sum total of all the excellent engineers in the rocket industry, and they all switched employers? You can make the same kind of corporate welfare arguments against a place like the Jet Propulsion Lab; they have a lock on outer space missions and fight fiercely both scientifically and politically to make sure nobody else gets to run those missions. And all this time I thought they did some pretty good science, but they apparently must be a bunch of hacks and jokers by your argument because no self-respecting scientist or engineer would want to work for a place like that.
You don't like the monopoly on the rocket industry? Fine. I don't like it either. It is the same for any project of that size. But to cast shit blindly upon the thousands of people who work at places like that, to me, is arrogant, dumb, and ignorant.
SpaceX didn't go hiring a bunch of ULA engineers to build the Falcon series of rockets; there's a quote floating around that it was like 5% came from existing rocket related enterprises. It turns out that rocket science and engineering is just science and engineering; anyone can do it.
And yeah, if you're an engineer and working for a company that employs 4 guys who keep a chair warm, 2 guys who create make work for everyone else, 1 guy who is a drooling moron, and you, and you're consequently spending 10 engineers worth of time to do 1 engineers worth of work, and you don't notice or care that its the case, you're fscking mediocre.
Good engineers pay attention, collect data, do metrics; if you don't do that, you're mediocre.
You work for ULA/ESA-Ariane/SLS, and you don't see the writing on the wall? You're mediocre.
In fact, you're the definition of mediocre.
Christ, its not even close; the majors have been in this business for almost 70 YEARS. I mean, how in the fsck do you have to charge 10X what your competitor charges when they just started doing, heavy industry, like this century, ferchissakes? I mean, ULA/ESA should be able to FART faster better cheaper rockets than SpaceX. The fact that they can't, and aren't even trying, tells you all you need to know not just about the companies/alliances themselves, but ALSO the people who work there.
And I didn't say anything about CalTech/JPL; we are talking about SpaceX competitors here. JPL might do theory, design, and testing, but I don't think they've built an EELV class launch vehicle lately. In any case there is no evidence they are mediocre since nobody else has built a planetary rover, deployed it, and done equivalent science with it for better than 1/10th the cost.
andy
Let me add to this great comment, there's also a layer of aerospace high tech suppliers used to making a huge profit supplying to Boeing/Lockheed and the rest of the old school gang.
SpaceX has pretty much gave that gang the boot, producing almost everything that is Space specific in house.
That's a significant part of why their costs are so radically cheaper. ULA is just part (a large part nonetheless) of the whole inefficient space gang.
We need this kind of radical, crazy smart innovation elsewhere. I suspect Nuclear Fission suffers from the same thing (massive ultra conservative corporations that don't have the guts to do anything out of their own pockets, General Electric anybody). I suspect aircraft innovation is going far slower than it has to be due to lack of interest in any disruptive innovation (and massive certification costs).
It's interesting how SpaceX never nags about what others try to do with them, they just move on with maximum grace.
Much better than ULA that already holds the US government hostage to the tune of one billion US$ per year.
It's not called ransom by the US government, but anyone looking at it with an open mind should reach the conclusion it is ransom !
The requirement should be that any launch services supplier must make no more than 50% of launch revenues from US govt launches, and keep at a minimum two completely independent suppliers (as in a CARTEL together like Boeing and Lockheed).
PS: This criteria is taylor made to force ULA to crash and burn.
But the conversion to a dead lift vehicle would cost ... Humm ... Let me guess... Some 41 billion dollars ?
That's called SLS ! This number is a realistic assessment by people that have no incentive to hide the real cost of things. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Program_costs
With those 41 billion dollars, SpaceX can design replacements to everything the SLS program aims to do, build a nuclear thermal rocket second stage, and execute one demo mission to the moon, one demo mission to mars, and fund all launches to put a new ISS in orbit (launches only). And make a 50% profit on top of it.
Again. it's a matter of economics... The reason the Shuttle was that big is it was suposed to be reuseable, as Elon explained, the wings/gliding concept is way too inefficient. I'm sure some people inside NASA knew the numbers were skittish, but again, govt workers don't care about billions that don't come from their pockets (taxpayers pay for that) and end up in the pockets of people that could employ them in the future.
If it were up to me, NASA would be reduced to a 3 layer bureacracy (director, program manager, associate program manager), limited at 50 employees, everything would be outsourced, based on a model much like the CRS program. Oops, I just got another 1000's of enemies that would stand to loose their jobs.
That's the problem with inefficient govt. My problem isn't with the scope of what the govt does, but the cost of what it does.
Nobody but you said he was the great second coming, you anonymous prick.
The price of the Model S says that, for all we decry the price of modern cars, that price is, in fact, cost-driven, and those costs are not avoidable. Unlike launch costs, which have now been unequivocally proven to be inflated with bogus "costs" that are entirely avoidable.
But to cast shit blindly upon the thousands of people who work at places like that, to me, is arrogant, dumb, and ignorant.
It was neither blind nor ignorant. As with router/andy, I too once worked for one of those companies. I held a Top Secret clearance. I saw exactly who worked for those companies, up close and personal. They sent me to training classes for software they used, and the instructor wanted to know if I'd worked with it before. I hadn't. I was fresh out of college and had never even heard of it before. But I picked it up so fast, he thought I'd already seen it. That was one of many things that told me the caliber of engineer they're used to seeing.
No, they aren't getting paid 10 times what you could get doing some other engineering job. They're paid considerably less than the average for the same number of years of experience, in most cases. The excuse the companies give for underpaying is the cost of getting the clearance. At best, they pay on par with other industries. As router/andy said, the bogus "costs" are for tasking 10 times as many engineers as the project should take, not paying the same number of engineers 10 times as much. Welfare for mediocre engineers is being kind.
Until SpaceX's successes, ULA was an illegal monopoly that perpetrated ongoing fraud on the US government, with the willing connivance of many members of that government, from acquisitions to Congress.