Of course, the Delta IV did have exactly the sort of launch history you describe. Its first launch was a commercial comsat but the next nine were all U.S. Gov’t. payloads: three weathersats – one for USAF and two for NOAA, two military comsats for USAF, a missile warning bird for USAF, two spooksats for NRO and a partially failed mission for USAF that put two birds in the wrong orbits. So, yeah, the Delta IV sure got off to a fast start launching those big expensive milsats and even managed to screw up a couple of them by the time it had flown the same number of missions as SpaceX has flown F9’s to-date. No three-successful-missions-and-a-year-of-close-inspections-and-paperwork-before-you-get-“certified”-to-bid nonsense either. Good thing, too, for ULA. Delta IV certainly didn’t meet the current certification criteria when it got to launch its first milsat.

Falcon 1 failures were not a factor in the decisions of either CASSIOPE’s owner (MDA, if I recall correctly) or Orbcomm. Falcon 1’s failures had been followed by two successful missions. CASSIOPE and the OG2 birds were both originally contracted to use the Falcon 1 or 1e. The lack of enough other prospective payloads in this size class in the mid and late 2000’s led to SpaceX cancelling that rocket as well as the intermediate Falcon 5 and going directly to Falcon 9. SpaceX offered very attractive rates for switching over to the much bigger new rocket. I believe CASSIOPE was launched for the original Falcon 1 price, or possibly less, and the OG2 birds were the first of two launches that Orbcomm is said to have contracted to pay a combined total of $43 million for. That’s at least modestly cheaper than what six Falcon 1 or 1e missions would have cost. So these two situations are not typical. Once the second Orbcomm OG2 launch is accomplished, I don’t think SpaceX has any more Falcon 1 legacy to work off. More to the point, both legacy Falcon 1 customers are satisfied with SpaceX’s service.

The Thaicomm 6 launch delay falls well within the fat part of the bell-shaped curve for GEO comsat launches. SpaceX’s launch of an SES GEO comsat preceding Thaicomm 6 also had delays. Ariane 5, the leader in this segment, at least for now, always has to find a pair of payloads they can launch together because their price is so high. One of the paired birds on each such mission pretty routinely gets delayed and holds up its taxi-sharing partner too. Such schedule delays are often at least as lengthy as the Thaicomm 6 mission you cited. And they are chronic to a point that this has become a significant bone of contention between
Arianespace and their customers. The aerospace trade press has run numerous stories on this topic.

ILS has scheduling problems that derive from the poor reliability of the Proton rocket they employ. Every time one of these fails, even if the mission was, as it usually is when this happens, a Russian government launch and not a commercial one arranged by ILS, no more Protons can be launched until the investigating board has finished its work. Such multi-month delays have occurred numerous times and twice in the past year. New launch dates for payloads delayed by the most recent such failure have just been announced, I believe.

Nor is ULA magically exempt from delays, though, in fairness, USAF and NRO can be a bit mercurial about schedules; witness the seemingly endless churn in what missions the ULA block buy will actually cover and the delay, possibly by years, of missions to put several new Block 3 GPS birds up. At least for now, three Atlas V’s are on the SpaceflightNow mission manifest for launch within the next 60 days. One of these, a commercial imaging bird, is said to have been delayed from “mid-2014″ which might be anywhere up to a month or two. No info about the cause of the delay is given so it might be that the slippage is payload- rather then launch vehicle-related. Of course some of the first Orbcomm OG2 mission delays were payload-related also.

Sure SpaceX needs to both ramp up its launch tempo and come closer to routinely hitting its marks. But it’s not like SpaceX has a uniquely awful mission slippage record. The other major players in satellite launch services have had their share of delays too.

It took Atlas V nearly five years (2002-7) to get its launch rate above two per year. It took Delta IV about four years (2002-6) to get its launch rate above two per year and then its launch rate nosedived to one launch over two years (2007-8). This is not a knock against Atlas V or Delta IV. But if anyone thinks that a slow ramp up in launches is a phenomenon peculiar to Falcon 9, they’re woefully ignorant of this business.

And despite pitiful launch rates for nearly a half decade, DOD committed billions and billions of dollars of national security satellites to Atlas V and Delta IV when they were new.

It’s asinine for the USAF apply a double standard to Falcon 9 now and keep it out of competition for most national security launches for a half-decade when that’s not what the USAF did with Atlas V and Delta IV.

It’s even more asinine when the incumbent launchers cost so much more to the DOD budget and taxpayer and are so much more vulnerable to foreign supply chains than the new entrant.

Cassiope: Contracted launch date 9/2008, Actually launched 9/29/2013 (5 years late) due to Falcon 1 failures and SpaceX decision to remanifest to Falcon 9.

Thaicom 6: Contracted launch date 6/2013, Actual launch date 1/6/2014 (6 months late)

OG2: Contracted launch date 8/2010, Actual launch date 7/14/2014 (4 years late)

Part of being mission capable is maintaining some semblance of a schedule and launch cadence. While civilian customers might be fine with delays in exchange for low prices, it is doubtful that DoD and NRO would look kindly on a launch provider that routinely launched their assets half a decade late.

Costs have never been higher.

There s no indigenous capability since the booster relies on Russian motors.

Its time to reconsider what this monopoly has done to the nation’s capabilities.