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SpaceX Wins $130 Million Air Force Launch Contract, Marking a First For Falcon Heavy (geekwire.com)
The U.S. Air Force has awarded a $130 million firm-fixed-price contract to SpaceX for the launch of its classified AFSPC-52 satellite on a Falcon Heavy rocket. From a report: It's the first national security contract won for SpaceX's heavy-lift rocket, which had its first test flight in February. AFSPC-52 is tue to lift off in 2020 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The launch will support the Air Force Space Command's "mission of delivering resilient and affordable space capabilities to our nation while maintaining assured access to space," Lt. Gen. John Thompson, Air Force program executive officer for space and commander of the Space and Missile Systems Center, said today in a news release. In an emailed statement, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said her company was "honored by the Air Force's selection of Falcon Heavy to launch the competitively awarded AFSPC-52 mission."
"Air Force"? Don't you mean...Space Force?
Probably not by the end of the year.
Everyone is mocking it, but this has been coming for a long time. Space is already a separate command in the Air Force, formed about 15ish years ago, more-or-less, to consolidate space acquistion (Los Angeles, mostly) and operations (Colordao, mostly). It's a logical development, they really are separate disciplines.
You better be nice or he won't let you come to Mars with us.
Note that $130M is only enough to pay for one Falcon Heavy launch with the additional government book-keeping. Commercial satellite vendors pay less, because they don't require as much compliance and paperwork.
So, it's really nice that Falcon Heavy got a government contract. However, SpaceX is not even close to recovering the cost of the engineering it put into it, and the first test launch. And they may never recover it before this business shifts to their new rocket, fondly called "BFR".
Bruce Perens.
Are they going to let SpaceX make the payload adapter this time? The Northrop Grumman one on Zuma resulted in mission failure.
Bruce Perens.
SpaceX is good for commercial launches where they are willling to accept a little higher risk to launch off the shelf commercial satellites. For things relating to national security, and one off NASA stuff thats been underway for a decade like James Webb, can they be so confident that it will be as reliable as the ULA stuff. The idea of something like James Webb being lost is pretty scary after its taken so long. SpaceX not being there yet as far as having the same record as ULA, doesnt mean its a bad platform for lower risk launches.
I still use Paypal. Never had a problem. The 130 Million is cab fare to space for the government's satellite. What's unfair about charging for the ride? ULA would have charged a lot more.
Bruce Perens.
Not really. He is really an idiot. Who else should pay to launch our military sats? Obviously it is going to be tax-payers. /. is now loaded with trolls. /. needs to decide if they are going to clean up this crap or simply allow /. to die.
The real issue is that
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
ULA USED to charge over 300M per launch. SX has forced it way down and they are still too expensive. That $354M does not include the 1B yearly subsidy .
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
which actually, they pretty much used to do. They have gotten ~1B/year subsidy since their inception. To that, they were launch Atlas 5s/Deltas at around 200-350M. Add in that subsidy and adds about ~100M / launch.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Note also that an Atlas at $177M can lift 4,750â"8,900 kg (10,470â"19,620 lb) to GTO, while a Falcon Heavy at $130M can lift 26,700 kg (58,900 lb) to GTO.
Bruce Perens.
Gosh, I hate Slashdot's handling of Unicode. An Atlas at $177M can lift 4,750-8,900 kg (10,470-19,620 lb) to GTO, while a Falcon Heavy at $130M can lift 26,700 kg (58,900 lb) to GTO.
Bruce Perens.
Well, not THIS payload obviously, the FH doesn't use these (or any other Russian) engines.
I like their implementation. Makes it easy to identify Apple users.
Anyone who automatically equates "government contract" with "evil" is obviously an idiot, so why would you care what they think?
Did you use google to translate from Russian to English?
Meanwhile, in the real world, Tesla sells four times more Model 3s in the US each month than the highest selling non-Telsla BEV. But don't worry your head about that. :)
SpaceX has been, and continues to, save US taxpayers massive amounts of money versus a formerly literal monopoly, ULA.
Hyperloop is a curious "scam" in that they released Hyperloop Alpha for free and did not attempt to pursue it, let alone raise money off of it. It's part of the long term plans of Boring Company, but low on their priority list.
Boring Company has no public funding, and has not sought public funding.
I was watching this thing on TV about some guy named Hitler. Someone should stop him!
Was just reading this article earlier today, and it seems to make a lot of sense. We need to A) come up with a plan to protect our satellite infrastructure and B) have MORE cooperation between the various branches of the military (and NOT another branch that will inevitably have different motivators than just supporting the others), so the Space Force is not the answer, but we need to do something.