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SpaceX, US Air Force Settle Spy Sat Dispute
hypnosec writes The US Air Force and private space flight company SpaceX have settled their dispute involving the military's expendable rocket program, thereby paving the way for SpaceX to join the spy satellite launch program known as Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV). The settlement opens doors for SpaceX to compete with United Launch Alliance (ULA) for launch of spy satellites. ULA is a joint Boeing-Lockheed venture – the only private player to have received clearance for launching black ops satellites.
Maybe someone high up in the USAF food chain is retireing soon and looking for a job... Boeing obviously didn't pay them off enough to keep exclusivity on their overpriced program.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Launching spy satellite is a very very lucrative business, and if Elon Musk is too headstrong into butting his SpaceX in, who knows what ULA will do next ...
Like what? Send over a few "tough guys"? Sabotage at SpaceX? ULA is going to have to "re-factor" their cash cow to be more competitive, or they will continue lose out on choice US government work; the public eye is on this stuff now, the politicians will have to answer for this sort of thing.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Right, the politicians will have to answer some tough questions. Politicians with constituents that work at ULA, in some case, in large numbers.
And why are spy satellites inherently bad things? Spying is not inherently bad, and can do some very good things for everyone. It can certainly be abused, but all that means is that we need meaningful oversight and checks against abuse. Even Snowden argues that the NSA needs to refocus on its core mission, not that it needs to be abolished entirely.
To give an example of Spy Satellites that are an unmitigated good, how about Nuclear Launch Early Warning Satellites? I think I'm pretty glad those are up there, because that's the sort of thing that can help calm jittery politicians that might otherwise have erred on the side of something really really bad.
That sure is a nice looking stage one rocket booster you have there.
It'd be a shame it something were to happen to it...
Like send the Colorado congressional delegation to attack SpaceX for no particularly good reason. ULA has a large operation in Denver and they pay Colorado Republicans handsomely.
@de_machina
Spying is not inherently bad
Indeed, spying is generally good. When leaders are ignorant of their enemy's capability, they tend to overreact. A century ago, the world bumbled into a world war because of secret treaties, and severe misjudgements about the intentions and constraints on others. Better spying may have prevented that. The cold war was also a result of each side escalating out of precautions driven by ignorance. Looking back, the Soviet Union was never as strong as we feared, and was motivated more by paranoia than by aggressiveness.
Voluntary mutual transparency would be the best solution, but spying is still better than secrecy.
The post contains several errors. EELV was a program in the 1990s to develop modernized rockets to launching USAF payloads (not just 'spy' satellites). The program produced two new competing launch vehicle families: the Boeing Delta IV and the Lockheed-Martin Atlas V. Subsequently, these launch providers merged to form the United Launch Alliance (ULA) which has had a monopoly on USAF launches. ULA has racked up an impeccable reliability record, with something approaching 100 straight successes, but the price per launch has been high. SpaceX wants to compete for that business with its much cheaper, but less well-proven, Falcon 9. But just around the time the Falcon 9 began to fly, the USAF signed a “block buy” agreement with ULA for several dozen rocket cores (the Heavy version of the Delta IV uses three cores, so the number of launches may be smaller). Only a smaller number of launches were left open for competitive bids, and that number was subsequently cut. SpaceX cried foul and sued the USAF. This is the suit which has been settled, with the settlement requiring the USAF to make a larger, but not publicly announced, number of launches open for competitive bidding. SpaceX is the only plausible near-term competitor to ULA. I think Orbital Sciences announced plans to offer their Antares (the rocket that crashed on a Space Station resupply mission a few months ago, but they're out of it for a while at least. Being allowed to compete doesn't guarantee SpaceX will win any of the business, though. It's possible that the USAF will decide to stick with the tried-and-true rather than risk their very expensive, and sometimes national security critical payloads to the upstart. More likely, the price difference may be so large that it justifies the added risk, at least for some payloads. We'll have to wait and see what they do.
That's mostly self-serving bollocks. If such observation is so good then it would be essential to let everyone know what is being observed and how. Secrecy works against such claims. Cold war espionage was a very different game. If observation had been so effective, the US would not have built so many nukes - or perhaps the secrecy of such observation allowed the US hawks to spin and get the level of overkill the US eventually achieved. Perhaps if you stopped treating the rest of the world as your enemy, we'd trust you more with this shit. But Snowden has shown we must not.
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USA: home of the world's largest terrorist training camp.
'Impeccable' except for the first Delta IV Heavy launch which put the dummy payload in the wrong orbit. Still did not stop the DoD from launching a really expensive satellite on it right on the next flight. Of course if your name is SpaceX instead of Boeing then you need to conduct dozens of continuous successful launches before being accepted. Fact is Falcon 9 also has an 'impeccable' launch record.
Also there are more companies working on the launch services market like Blue Origin which may eventually enter the market. There are other companies which could launch the US satellites but they're foreign companies so for US national security reasons they can't be used. Even if the company is run by US allies like Arianespace.
Military launches are where the money is. It would not surprise me if SpaceX's long-term goal has always been do business into the US department of defence with the talk of manned missions being primarily a way of getting media attention. Even if Elon Musk really does want to send people to Mars military launches are a good way to raise the funds to do so.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Yes and no.
The pre-existing "private space industry" was only private in that it was private companies doing work for the government. We're talking about big defense aerospace contractors. You couldn't just go up to Boeing or Lockheed and pay them to launch a payload into orbit. They only sold their rockets to the military/NASA, and if you wanted a payload to go up, you had to get the government to do it. The difference now is that private companies such as SpaceX and Orbital are not just building the rockets, they're launching them too. While the government still has a certain regulatory/oversight involvement, that's hardly the same thing as before. No, the commercial rocket-building business isn't new, but the commercial rocket-launching business certainly is.
To make an analogy, it would be as if the government previously had been the only purchaser and operator of airplanes in the U.S., even though they were made by Boeing; but now you could go to a private company and fly on an airplane run by them.
The Colorado representatives favor ULA, of course. So they asked for information about the full costs to have SpaceX do it, mentioned that SpaceX has a higher rate of cancelled launches, etc. Just as SpaceX and their representatives point out the downsides of the ULA contract. I think that's a good thing, that the House and the American people hear both perspectives, then make decisions.
Certainly you wouldn't want the administration to make these choices behind closed doors, with no public information about why they chose one vendor over another and what the options were, would you?
Your point undercuts your conclusion. Imagery intelligence in the early cold war was limited and poor, and it led to a lot of mistaken analysis - see the "Missile Gap" that Kennedy made a point of his 1960 campaign. It was the use of spy satellites that finally disproved the notion.
As for letting everyone know and how, you apparently don't realize that's exactly the last thing you want to do in Intelligence work. Why? Because when the target of the collection knows what, how, and when you can collect, they can take measures to prevent you from collecting, or feed you false information. It could be something as simple as making sure a secret prototype airplane isn't outside when the satellite passes overhead, or something as complex as the D-Day deception operations - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Quicksilver_(WWII) .
Look, I know it's popular right now to hate on the NSA/CIA/etc, and there's certainly no shortage of abuses we've heard about recently. Even if you think it's bad enough that everyone presently in the business should get fired, that doesn't mean the USA can afford to get out of the intelligence business entirely. I can assure you no one else is going to do so, nor should you trust them if they say they will. Moreover, by decrying the entirety of it as evil and immoral you're discrediting the very argument against those abuses in the first place, and abetting their defenders who want everyone to think that it's one and the same with the legitimate intelligence activities those agencies are supposed to be conducting.
Maybe I just don't understand the bold postmodern reality where you can change things just by changing what you call them; but isn't a 'united alliance' between the two effective players in a market what we used to call a 'cartel'?
Is there some sort of argument in favor of it that gets trotted out with a straight face when someone asks if there was just too much 'ruinous competition' between Boeing and Lockheed, and some 'price stability' was badly needed, or is this purely a because we can sort of operation?