Wrong, of course. Suggest you revisit lunar mission manifests. Plenty of spacecraft have returned to the lunar vicinity since 1972.

No, because you’re idiotically comparing a service provided to the government with a subsidy to a supposedly commercial firm. I am happy to not provide loan guarantees to Halliburton or anyone, but Halliburton is not a Solyndra. SpaceX isn’t a Solyndra even more (though Tesla can at least be usefully compared to it).

Only because that waste is something that doesn’t bother people who think like you do..

Waste is waste. RGO

“Without any previous business experience, Cheney leaves the Department of Defense to become the CEO of Halliburton Co., one of the biggest oil-services companies in the world. He will be chairman of the company from 1996 to October 1998 and from February to August 2000. Under Cheney’s leadership, Halliburton moves up from 73rd to 18th on the Pentagon’s list of top contractors. The company garners $2.3 billion in U.S. government contracts, which almost doubles the $1.2 billion it earned from the government previously. Most of the contracts are granted by the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers.3 Halliburton’s overseas operations go from 51% to 68% of its revenue. According to the Center for Public Integrity,4 under Cheney’s leadership the company also receives $1.5 billion worth of assistance from government-sponsored agencies such as OPIC (Overseas Private Investment Corporation) and the Export-Import Bank, a huge increase compared to the $100 million that the company had received in federal loans and guarantees in the five years prior to Cheney’s arrival. Years later, during the 2000 campaign in a broadcasted vice presidential candidates’ debate with Joe Lieberman, Cheney asserts that “the government has absolutely nothing to do” with his financial success as chairman of Halliburton Co.5 Halliburton pleads guilty to criminal charges of violating a U.S. ban on exports to Libya by selling Col. Qaddafi six pulse neutron generators, devices that can be used to detonate nuclear weapons.6 Halliburton pays a $3.8 million penalty to settle alleged violations of the U.S. trade ban.”

http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/about_hal/chronology.html

Still, the problem with Orion is not the basic design. It’s the fact that it is too expensive to develop, too large and uneconomical for commercial use and not even available for commercial use. If they were to spin off an Orion Lite, that would be fine.

This is an idiotic comparison.

Yes, it worked to ensure that we haven’t returned to the moon in almost forty years.

Apollo worked.

“Atlas is the best of US launch vehicles. NASA, USAF, NRO and Commercial prefer it.”

That is the situation as of today where Atlas V and Delta IV are the only choices, and expensive choices they are. The real cost of an Atlas V 401, with all the various payments made to ULA, is somewhere around 3-5X more than Falcon 9.

When you don’t have a choice, then you shrug off the amount as the cost of doing business. But you can see that some in the Air Force are willing to look at alternatives that can save them $100M or more per launch – you can buy a lot of military grade equipment at that rate.

Now you can argue, correctly, that the Falcon 9 doesn’t have the payload size flexibility of the Atlas V with it’s strap-on SRB’s. However that flexibility will be challenged when Falcon Heavy becomes operational, since even if they fly it 1/4 full it will still cost less than the least costly Atlas V (low end Falcon Heavy = $80M).

The reason ULA is pushing so hard on the block buy is that they know they only have a few years before SpaceX gets approved by the Air Force for launch business. My guess would be that ULA will loose half their order backlog within a couple of years after that if they don’t get serious with major price reductions. I think Stratolaunch will put some pressure on them too if the Air Force decides to expand their small-sat program.

I don’t want ULA to go away, as I want robust competition in the launch market, but they need to get serious about how they will compete long term.

But is it also the most economical vehicle? You have said many times that Falcon’s prices will rise, but are you confident its costs will exceed those of Atlas eventually?