Comments on: Pentagon: sorry about the ULA delay http://www.spacepolitics.com/2006/05/10/pentagon-sorry-about-the-ula-delay/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=pentagon-sorry-about-the-ula-delay Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway... Wed, 17 Sep 2014 13:35:41 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.0.38 By: Jeff Foust http://www.spacepolitics.com/2006/05/10/pentagon-sorry-about-the-ula-delay/#comment-7853 Thu, 11 May 2006 17:35:38 +0000 http://www.districtofbaseball.com/spacepolitics/?p=973#comment-7853 ME: there has been a fair amount of rumormongering about the possibility of closing one of the EELV lines should the ULA be approved; one can certainly read through the lines of Krieg’s statements to think that this option has at least been considered. It all depends on how tightly they cling to the concept of “assured access”, which is a bit of a myth: one can argue that it doesn’t exist today, and forming the ULA, with its consolidation of manufacturing operations, doesn’t strengthen it (imagine what happens the next time there’s a strike, or if an F5 tornado plows through Decatur.)

]]> By: ME http://www.spacepolitics.com/2006/05/10/pentagon-sorry-about-the-ula-delay/#comment-7852 Thu, 11 May 2006 14:23:04 +0000 http://www.districtofbaseball.com/spacepolitics/?p=973#comment-7852 I’ve reread the Reuters article several times now and can’t see where Krieg suggests at all that the “emphasis of the venture had shifted from keeping both the Delta and Atlas lines in operation to alternatives that might lead to the retirement of one or the other”.

The statements in the Reuters article indicate that the goal remains to keep two rocket families – “… to ensure that it could launch key satellites into space whenever it needed, even if one rocket had failed.”

In my understanding, the “model” for assurance referred to in the quote that was used in the post – “So ultimately, the question is, given how many launches there are, does the current model provide you assurance or is there a different way to do it.” – refers to whether you have two separate companies producing two vehicles (the current model) or a single entity producing two vehicles (the ULA model). It was not a consideration of the retirement of either EELV vehicle.

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