SpaceX is poised to win an Air Force national security launch contract by default because its archrival, United Launch Alliance, has dropped out of the competition.
ULA said this week that it decided not to bid on the Air Force contract for launching a GPS-3 satellite in 2018, leaving SpaceX as the sole bidder. The contract was the first of its kind to come up since the Air Force certified SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket to launch national security payloads.
Reuters quoted ULA’s chief executive officer, Tory Bruno, as saying that the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture couldn’t submit a compliant bid because of a federally mandated ban on the use of Russian-built RD-180 engines for national security launches. ULA uses the RD-180s on the first stage of its Atlas 5 rocket, which has traditionally been used for such launches. A defense authorization bill currently under consideration in Congress includes a provision that would give ULA access to four more of the engines, but that bill has not yet been signed into law.
Bruno also told Reuters that the criteria for bid selection don’t give ULA enough credit for its record of reliability and schedule certainty, and that the accounting procedures for separating the funds for GPS-3 from other government contracts were too onerous.
Monday was the deadline for submitting a bid for the GPS-3 launch. SpaceX declined to comment on the prospects for the contract, which is thought to be worth in the neighborhood of $70 million to $80 million.
A year and a half ago, SpaceX filed a federal lawsuit claiming that ULA had an unfair monopoly on national security launches. ULA’s use of Russian-made engines came up as an argument in the case. After months of negotiations, SpaceX agreed to drop its challenge in January, and the Air Force gave the Falcon 9 its launch certification in May.
Although SpaceX is poised to win the GPS-3 contract, there’s still a chance that the rules of the game could be changed to bring ULA back into the competition. In fact, some might argue that ULA’s decision not to bid is aimed precisely at getting the rules changed. In a letter sent last month to Defense Secretary Ash Carter, SpaceX founder Elon Musk complained that ULA was engaging in “deceptive brinksmanship” in its efforts to win a waiver from the Russian engine ban.
Blue Origin, a Seattle-area space venture founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, is developing a rocket engine called the BE-4 that could replace the Russian-built engines on ULA’s next-generation Vulcan rocket by 2018. The restrictions on Russian engines add to the urgency of the BE-4 effort, as well as a backup plan that involves Aerojet Rocketdyne’s AR-1 engine.
