Reuters reported yesterday that Boeing and Lockheed Martin are still waiting for the Federal Trade Commission to approve the formation of the United Launch Alliance, contrary to a report published Saturday by US Space News, which claimed that the FTC had rejected the merger. (The Reuters article primarily covers separate negotiations between Boeing and the Air Force on a launch contract like the one between Lockheed and the Air Force; that contract is not expected to be finalized before June 30, although that doesn’t appear to play a role in the ULA approval process.) US Space News, meanwhile, published a two-sentence denial of its original report provided by Lockheed Martin, although the site still claims that it has “creditable [sic] data that the FTC rejected the ULA proposal”, although neither the data nor the sources of the data are specified.
