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SpaceX Wins $130 Million Air Force Launch Contract, Marking a First For Falcon Heavy (geekwire.com) 112

Posted by msmash from the marching-forward dept.
The U.S. Air Force has awarded a $130 million firm-fixed-price contract to SpaceX for the launch of its classified AFSPC-52 satellite on a Falcon Heavy rocket. From a report: It's the first national security contract won for SpaceX's heavy-lift rocket, which had its first test flight in February. AFSPC-52 is tue to lift off in 2020 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The launch will support the Air Force Space Command's "mission of delivering resilient and affordable space capabilities to our nation while maintaining assured access to space," Lt. Gen. John Thompson, Air Force program executive officer for space and commander of the Space and Missile Systems Center, said today in a news release. In an emailed statement, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said her company was "honored by the Air Force's selection of Falcon Heavy to launch the competitively awarded AFSPC-52 mission."
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SpaceX Wins $130 Million Air Force Launch Contract, Marking a First For Falcon Heavy More

SpaceX Wins $130 Million Air Force Launch Contract, Marking a First For Falcon Heavy

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  • This is a huge win for SpaceX. Everything Musk touches turns to gold. I hear he is going to be building a Hyperloop between NYC and DC soon, and offer rides for a $1 on his LA tunnel.
    • I'd rather bet on Elon than someone so full of bits.
      • What are you "betting" on? He is just another scam artist who brought us the lovely Paypal. Remember them? Shady company #1. Now he has baboozled taxpayer money into his newest schemes. The house of cards is falling though.
        • I still use Paypal. Never had a problem. The 130 Million is cab fare to space for the government's satellite. What's unfair about charging for the ride? ULA would have charged a lot more.
          • ULA STILL charges a lot more. Even with these atlas at 177M, that does not include their yearly ~1B subsidy.
          • Oh God, not the old "well they are doing it too!" schtick. The point is that SpaceX is out to make a buck of off taxpayers money, like all of Musk's schemes. He isn't a hero or doing anything noble. Tesla is building EVs for the 0.01% while other manufacturers are actually building affordable EVs today. Hyperloop was a scam from the start. Boring company is the same: attempt to extract public money building tunnels for inefficient transportation scheme.

            • Re: Nice! (Score:5, Informative)

              by Rei ( 128717 ) on Friday June 22, 2018 @09:24AM (#56828232) Homepage

              Meanwhile, in the real world, Tesla sells four times more Model 3s in the US each month than the highest selling non-Telsla BEV. But don't worry your head about that. :)

              SpaceX has been, and continues to, save US taxpayers massive amounts of money versus a formerly literal monopoly, ULA.

              Hyperloop is a curious "scam" in that they released Hyperloop Alpha for free and did not attempt to pursue it, let alone raise money off of it. It's part of the long term plans of Boring Company, but low on their priority list.

              Boring Company has no public funding, and has not sought public funding.

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by d0rp ( 888607 )

              Tesla is building EVs for the 0.01% while other manufacturers are actually building affordable EVs today.

              Musk's stated goal when creating Tesla was to accelerate the auto industry's switch to electric (since autos are our biggest polluter), and that seems to be what has happened. Before Tesla, none of the auto makers were really serious about EVs and were happy with the status-quo.

              • Re: (Score:1)

                by Anonymous Coward

                Before Tesla, none of the auto makers were really serious about EVs and were happy with the status-quo.

                Musk knows how to sell his companies like "disrupting" and himself as a "visionary" very well. That's why he is rich, basically.

                But reality is way far from what you have been told to think about Musk and Tesla. Reality is that almost every single car manufacturer had full electric prototypes since more than 15 years when Tesla was presented to the public. Not to mention those manufacturers that have invested billions during decades in REAL Research & Development in finding alternative power sources like

                • Years before Tesla was an idea, there were already small networks of hydrogen fuel stations in some places in Europe and in United States.

                  And they still are...small, that is. Mostly because hydrogen is either an either failed or at least very premature technological bet from the investors. Picking the right stuff to do is very important.

  • Elon bought himself another 3.7 days of operating capital!

  • But 110010001000 just told us (literally) yesterday that "Musk is a flim flam artist" [slashdot.org]! How dare you question him! /s

    Note to haters: hate someone based on fact or opinion but never hate someone based on your own delusions.

  • Only one launch (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Thursday June 21, 2018 @09:59PM (#56826314) Homepage Journal

    Note that $130M is only enough to pay for one Falcon Heavy launch with the additional government book-keeping. Commercial satellite vendors pay less, because they don't require as much compliance and paperwork.

    So, it's really nice that Falcon Heavy got a government contract. However, SpaceX is not even close to recovering the cost of the engineering it put into it, and the first test launch. And they may never recover it before this business shifts to their new rocket, fondly called "BFR".

    • Don't worry. We will all be living on Mars and admiring the view over cocktails soon. And don't worry about cost: we will just borrow more. The good times will never end!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

        Don't worry. We will all be living on Mars and admiring the view over cocktails soon. And don't worry about cost: we will just borrow more. The good times will never end!

        Once we get the Space Force up and running that will really kick off the space economy. Think of the value alone in building and supplying all those Trump branded properties: the Trump Interstellar Hotel, Mars-a-lago, and of course the Trump Presidential Golf Club Luna.

    • I'm sure they are happy to have the work; the manifest is looking slim for 2019/20. If the boosters are used and recovered it is at least something more to amortize costs over.

      • 2019/2020 aren't great but they aren't so bad either. There are 41 flights between them counting this one. Perhaps some won't fly by the end of 2020. Maybe some of the crew ones. And they might start launching their own satellites by the end of 2020.

  • Payload adapter (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Thursday June 21, 2018 @10:19PM (#56826366) Homepage Journal
    Are they going to let SpaceX make the payload adapter this time? The Northrop Grumman one on Zuma resulted in mission failure.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Are they going to let SpaceX make the payload adapter this time? The Northrop Grumman one on Zuma resulted in mission failure.

      Does it really matter? Somebody else is building the satellite, if that doesn't work the mission is a failure too. So it's just shifting responsibility a bit from "We got you to the intended orbit, the rest is up to you" to "We got you to the intended orbit and detached the payload, the rest is up to you". As long as SpaceX is performing whatever part of the job they should be doing they'll get more business, I don't think they care who makes the adapter. Even though it was a classified mission blame was pr

  • Reliability compared to ULA (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Eravnrekaree ( 467752 ) on Thursday June 21, 2018 @11:34PM (#56826570)

    SpaceX is good for commercial launches where they are willling to accept a little higher risk to launch off the shelf commercial satellites. For things relating to national security, and one off NASA stuff thats been underway for a decade like James Webb, can they be so confident that it will be as reliable as the ULA stuff. The idea of something like James Webb being lost is pretty scary after its taken so long. SpaceX not being there yet as far as having the same record as ULA, doesnt mean its a bad platform for lower risk launches.

    • This deal is for a national security satellite, though. And it's to ride on Falcon Heavy, which launched once, although the base Falcon 9 rockets are building up a nice heritage. So, it sounds like the government is getting more comfortable with SpaceX. Given the difference in price, maybe they feel they can build a second satellite with what they save.

      • Who's national security? Funny how over the years, that we go from "secret surveillance good" to "secret surveillance bad". Lather, rinse, repeat.

        I don't think that it is a stretch for Congress to enact a law that says that we get a truthful general idea of what these things are for.

        Such as:

        1) This one spies on Russia, China, and other nations for the purpose of "blah, blah, blah."
        2) This one looks at the US, but only for the purpose generally of "blah, blah, blah."

        The over-doing of secrecy in our governmen

        • The over-doing of secrecy in our government has caused me (and hopefully most of you) to distrust our government more and more.

          Nah. There's more transparency in government now than there was in, say, the 1950s. What's changed is that we have far more access to information now than we ever had before, so people expect even less "secrecy". When you don't even have enough information to know how much is secret, you tend not to think about it much.

    • Re:Reliability compared to ULA (Score:5, Interesting)

      by EnsilZah ( 575600 ) <[moc.liamG] [ta] [haZlisnE]> on Friday June 22, 2018 @04:27AM (#56827166)

      Well, they've definitely had a couple of bumps on the road, but they're getting there.
      They said they're pretty much locking down the design of the current iteration of the Falcon 9 and will continue flying it unchanged as they shift focus to the BFR.

      I think if you look a little bit further ahead, you'll have to ask the reverse question, does ULA's record of reliability hold when they retire their current rocket families (Which they must, one for being too expensive, and the other for using Russian engines) and start launching on a newly designed rocket with newly designed engines when SpaceX will have more than a hundred launches under their belt?

    • There is no such thing as rockets that will never fail. If you have made a payload that is "too big to fail" you have failed already and yes, JWST counts as a poster-child here. There is always a possibility that launch vehicle fails and there is always a possibility that the payload itself fails. With the sums in play you must play it safe and be capable of putting up a backup payload if something goes wonky, because eventually it will. JWST could and should have been spread out into several technically it
      • People sometimes have trouble grasping big numbers when it comes to money, in comparison, the entire ITER project currently runs at 14 billion. Weigh the potential payoffs and size of the project there for a second and consider that ITER is pretty much guaranteed the work while JWST merely should be ok if nothing goes wrong. You really shouldn't start multi decade projects unless there is absolutely no other way to make meaningful advances.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jaa101 ( 627731 )

      The idea of something like James Webb being lost is pretty scary after its taken so long.

      Nothing like as scary as the chances of it failing after launch. That thing is so horrendously complex with multiple, thin insulators to be deployed by pulling on cables. They should have added 20 per cent to the cost and built two, the second to go up only after the first has been launched and any failures understood.

    • The James Webb telescope is being sent up on an Ariane 5. Not ULA.

    • SpaceX has a higher reliability and cheaper cost than ULA.

    • It's not like ULA hasn't had near misses. They got lucky so far, but the next time an engine fails to compete its burn it could wreck the mission.

  • In Capitalist Russia RD-181 rocket engines are exported to you.
    In USA RD-180 and RD-181 rocket engines lift U.S. Air Force secret heavy payload up for you.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by joh ( 27088 )

      Well, not THIS payload obviously, the FH doesn't use these (or any other Russian) engines.

    • If it is a really heavy payload it will be on either a Falcon Heavy or a Delta IV Heavy rocket, the #1 and #2 operational launch vehicles in the world measured by payload mass to orbit. Both made in USA, neither with Russian engines.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AHuxley ( 892839 )
        Yet the US is really still accepting batches of RD-180 and RD-181 rocket engines for the U.S. Air Force...

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