Lawmakers should take a hard look at the track record of billionaire Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp, or SpaceX, the head of its chief competitor said.
The “space and business press is awash in stories that chronicle the history of SpaceX over-promising and under-delivering on both cost and schedule” for NASA missions, United Launch Alliance President Salvatore “Tory” Bruno told a House Armed Services Committee panel Friday in a statement for the record he didn’t deliver orally.
“Before the committee and Congress potentially grant a new monopoly to SpaceX, it must examine the record of SpaceX’s promises and actual performance that have defined the company to date,” Bruno said in the prepared testimony, which contains footnotes to numerous news articles. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket was certified in May for some national security space launches.
The House and Senate armed services committees are set to negotiate a compromise version of the fiscal 2016 defense authorization bill that seeks to modify the current law, which prohibits the use of the Russian-built RD-180 engines used by ULA’s Atlas V rocket after 2019. ULA, the Pentagon and the Air Force say more time is needed to develop an alternative U.S.-made booster engine.
The current provision in this year’s defense authorization bills eliminates Atlas V rockets, which are cost-competitive against SpaceX’s cheaper Falcon 9 for contests after 2018, according to Centennial-based ULA and Pentagon and Air Force officials.
The House version would allow ULA to use all 29 RD-180 engines it ordered or paid for before Russia annexed Crimea last year; the pending Senate measure authorizes fewer.
The restriction took on new significance with SpaceX’s certification in May for military launches, which capped months of effort by the closely-held company to do missions beyond those for NASA.
ULA, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co., generated about $2.6 billion a year as the sole provider under the current Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. Twenty-eight EELV launches from 2020 to 2024 are up for competition, giving SpaceX a shot at supplanting ULA.
Compounding the impact of the Atlas V restrictions, ULA says it’s ending production in 2018-2019 of medium and intermediate-weight launch Delta IV rockets because they’re too expensive to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9. The Delta IV is 35 percent more expensive to build and launch than an Atlas V, Bruno said.
SpaceX spokesman John Taylor said at the hearing that he had not seen Bruno’s written statement, so had no immediate comment. Bloomberg News provided him with a copy.
Bruno’s warning of a gap in national launch capability is a “fiction” created by the Delta IV’s “premature retirement,” Jeffery Thornburg, SpaceX’s senior director of propulsion engineering, told the committee in prepared remarks. ULA’s decision to end medium-lift Delta IV production is a “self- imposed reduction in its own capabilities,” Thornburg said.
ULA’s attempt change the current law to allow for longer RD-180 engine use “will cost the U.S. taxpayer more money and unnecessarily extend dependence on Russia, and finance Russian military capabilities with U.S. taxpayer dollars,” Thornburg added.
In an interview after the hearing, Bruno said, “I’m suggesting they take a complete and in-depth look at” the SpaceX record “and now’s time for them to do.”
Bruno in his testimony referred back to a 2011 claim by SpaceX that it could build rockets for 75 percent less than its competitors, “yet costs for SpaceX launches have climbed at an alarming rate.”
