While most of the media attention on the space-related aspects of the FY06 budget proposal has been on NASA, there are also some significant military space developments. According to the Washington Post, the ’06 defense budget includes $864 million—an increase of $340 million—to support the two EELV contractors, Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The money will be used to support the fixed costs of both the Atlas 5 and Delta 4, in accordance with the new space transportation policy released last month.
This support became necessary in recent years because of a drop in demand for commercial launches as well as a desire by the Air Force to maintain “assured access” to space by maintaining two different launch vehicle families. A “senior defense official” told the Post that “Maybe the commercial market will come back,” allowing the DoD to reduce the amount of money it has to pay to support the vehicles. This seems more like wishful thinking than anything: while commercial launch demand is expected to increase slightly through the end of the decade, there will remain strong competition from non-US vehicles; moreover, Boeing doesn’t make the Delta 4 commercially available. (The article states that there were “55 rocket launches” in 2004; in fact, there were 54 orbital launch attempts, plus a number of suborbital launches, and only 15 of those 54 were commercial.)
I think that the Delta is still commercially available, at least in theory, for someone who really wants a ride on it and is willing to pay for it. Boeing just doesn’t market it for that purpose.
Maybe there will something for the commercial market to come back to after they deal with ITAR.