The Wall Street Journal [subscription required] reports today that it appears highly unlikely that Boeing and Lockheed Martin will get all the regulatory approvals it needs to move ahead with the formation of the United Launch Alliance by the end of the year. When the ULA was announced in May, Boeing and Lockheed believed that they would get all the clearances needed to move ahead with the joint venture by late this year, but have been stymied by regulatory delays. The FTC isn’t expected to make a formal recommendation on the joint venture until the middle of this month, and the Pentagon is still performing its own review. Concerns about the joint venture have been raised by Northrop Grumman, which is concerned that the ULA might give Boeing and Lockheed an advantage when competing for satellite contracts; and SpaceX (curiously spelled “SpaceEx” in the article), which believes the ULA is anti-competitive.
Northrup has quite a valid concern here in that NASA has increasingly been awarding contracts out to full system integrators. These integrators are responsible for not only building the spacecraft, but also for building up the ground segment and launching the rocket. This is what they are currently doing wit the GOES-R competition and others. It is making it so only companies of the size of Lockheed, Boeing and Northrup can win these contracts. This is squeezing out the littler guys like Orbital, Ball, Loral, Spectrum, Swales and others from even being able to compete for civil government contracts except as riding on the shirt-tails of the big three aerospace conglomerates.
Soon the commercial space manufacturing segment will look just like the commercial airline manufacturing segment in that only the big guys will be able to survive. Unfortunately, the alt.space community is too fixated on the transportation aspect of space to even look at what is happening here. If the alt.space community ever hopes to build big orbital lift rockets AND have customers for their non-human rockets, they should all be fighting to stop this and not just spaceX.
I’m prepared to be proven wrong, here, but I’m hard put to see a single benefit to the aerospace “consolidation” of this past decade. Have projects become less expensive, more efficient, or more capable? Has it resulted in more innovation by the majors? Has it resulted in more corporate investment in R&D? Has even one promise been kept? Instead, I see it as a major contributor (though not the only one) to the United States’ loss of market share. This is especially so in aircraft, but is it distressingly so in spacecraft and launch vehicles.
If I had any say in the matter, there would be no United Launch Alliance. Companies would be encouraged to concentrate on producing better spacecraft and rockets, rather than playing financial games that benefit no one but top management and (occasionally) shareholders.
— Donald
The only benefit has been reduced budget outlays. Unfortunately, the government space market is too small to support enough providers for a healthy industry.
Unfortunately, the government space market is too small to support enough providers for a healthy industry.
Exactly!
Develop new demand and there are an abundance of people with good ideas for Earth-to-LEO lift. Without new demand, the existing players fight like raptors over what little business exists.
Reduced outlays? Really? Certainly not for unit spacecraft actually developed and flown!
— Donald