Still, I can’t help but give at least a smigin of a kudo to those “Crazy shi..t.” Spam-masters for a creatively invasive advert.
OKAY, JEFF, YOU CAN KILL IT NOW… PLEASE!!!

However, that is just a ‘what if…?’ America has to deal with the reality of today, which is a decimated rocket engine industry and a whole generation of staff at the companies who are mostly only project managers and operations staffers not actual rocket-makers.

Your take is pretty much mine with a few minor mods; SpaceX runs the table and winds up, over the next few years, with most of the private launch business worldwide, plus nearly all the U.S. government launch business.

I don’t see ULA being able to cope with either recent Russian moves or with SpaceX. They can’t copy SpaceX’s vertical integration model and their traditional model no longer works. Even should the government hand them a free new engine – in five or six years – they won’t resurrect or replace Atlas V in any meaningful way and that will doom the combine well before then. To the extent Boeing wishes to make any continuing go of Delta IV, they’ll do it by shucking off the dead husk of ULA and taking it back in-house. Even under these circumstances, Delta IV’s long-term viability looks bad.

The Europeans are in a complete state of funk, torn, as they are, between realizing they must be cost-competitive and also realizing that European launcher production depends crucially on mercantilist politics of an unyielding, but fragile, nature. The all-solid Ariane 6 will make the French happy, but leave the Germans out in the cold. A liquid-fueled booster design would placate the Germans, but cut critically into anticipated French economies of scale for French dual-use solids (Ariane 6 and next-gen strategic missiles). I don’t think this conundrum has a solution with real roots. Ariane 5, even with planned improvements, is a hopelessly uneconomic dead end.

The Russians (ILS) are till being plagued with quality and reliability problems. Proton is, literally, a dice roll; one in every dozen or so of them blows up or otherwise fails. The now virtually all-Russian Sea Launch platform is, if anything, worse. Recent efforts to re-state-industrialize the Russian space sector will make the old commies now running Russia again feel better, but it won’t solve any problems.

SpaceX pretty much has no near-term competition at this point. The only potential competitors on the horizon are Orbital and Stratolaunch. Orbital will have to re-engineer the entire Antares first stage to get something producible over the long term. They seem interested in doing so and the recent ATK merger gives them at least one solid option (pun intended). If they do so, they could give SpaceX some competition, a few years, hence, for low-end national security launches, Delta II-class NASA payloads and, of course, ISS resupply, assuming ISS doesn’t go in the drink in the meantime.

Orbital also has a stake in Stratolaunch’s success and would be the major co-beneficiary of that effort. By the time Stratolaunch is operational, SpaceX should have Falcon Heavy in service with both F9 and FH first stages routinely reusable. Stratolaunch will not be anywhere near competitive with SpaceX across the latter’s entire range of launch capabilities, but it will have competitive niches. One of them might turn out to be launching constellations of smallsats/cubesats/nanosats into high-inclination low and medium earth orbits.

As to Musk “becoming political” – yes and no. He’s certainly not doing anything overtly partisan. The rot in NASA and national security launch markets is a model of modern bi-partisan sleaze. So Musk is not playing politics so much as continuing his masterful use of public relations in a more overtly political arena. He’s being opposed in corruptly political ways by his current competitors and he’s simply attacking them with the most effective tools at his disposal.

In this case, he’s putting on his Jimmy Stewart suit and starring in his own remake of ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ with Richard Shelby cast in the Claude Rains part. I think this initiative will prove as successful as his others. Mr. Musk is not only a gifted automotive and rocket engineer, but an obviously skillful political engineer as well.

His opponents want to keep the whole fight back in the shadows so, naturally enough, Mr. Musk counters by renting klieg lights and putting on a well-lit show in plain view of everyone. He appreciates that one never wins by fighting on ground of one’s opponent’s choosing.

It’s going to be an exiting and intensely interesting next few years.

I sorta think that SpaceX is going to gain pretty much a monopoly on the launch business world-wide. There are currently no indications that anyone is going to be able to match them (subject to government subsidies – which are going out of style) and for those companies attempting to do so, the timelines are too long, eg. ESA. This is all subject to SpaceX managing to deliver their products reliably and on schedule – still a challenge for them.

In addition, Musk is becoming political. It’s taken a while but he now seems prepared to take the fight up to the competition and the politicians which was something he wasn’t doing a while ago. Also he’s getting his message across and gaining greater traction which is also something new.

Cheers.

The result has been huge amounts of ingenuity applied to working around the transportation bottleneck. This has resulted in a number of useful advances, so I wouldn’t call the exercise a “pathetic failure”.

But, as you point out, none of this has resulted yet in winning the prize, simply because they set the bar too high for the size of the prize.

A minority among the activist community has been talking about the problem for decades, for whatever that’s worth. More recently, the Augustine Commission pointed out that the US aerospace vendor base is imploding.

You are correct that neither the government nor the advocacy community as a whole have done anything unified about that since. Certain small corners of both communities are trying to work the problem.

The question seems to be, how big a crisis will it take to focus wider attention to the problem? We’ll find out, since we’re due for a series of ever-worse crises till we do finally get serious.

(The meta-question, of course, is will one of these crises be fatal first?)