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>Launch is an ugly business, you have big fixed costs but very lumpy revenues since you get paid when the rocket leaves the ground (which can be delayed for yea
by gozur88 9y ago
>Launch is an ugly business, you have big fixed costs but very lumpy revenues since you get paid when the rocket leaves the ground (which can be delayed for years due to late payloads, political roadblocks etc), and Delta and Atlas weren't competitive in the commercial market so they couldn't smooth things out.
Add to that the real money is in the satellites themselves. If you were a big company like Lockheed it made far more sense to stick to building sats and buying launch services from someone else.
>Obviously, that changes with SpaceX around, but what hasn't changed is that if Congress pulls that contract, they'll just kill ULA and the Delta and Atlas will be gone.
Congress will probably allow Delta to die, but they're not going to be 100% dependent on Falcon. All it takes is a failed launch and nothing goes up for six months while investigators figure out what happened.
- badwolf 9y agoI definitely agree that Delta will die. Probably not before there's another launch provider with reusable rockets (Looking your way Blue Origin/New Glenn)
- elif 9y agoI am not a rocket scientist... but it seems like a 6 month investigation delay would be comparable to the time it would take to procure and integrate the payload into a completely different rocket? Also if the launch savings exceed the total payload costs, in a pinch couldn't they just roll the dice given falcon's success %? (The last falcon investigation delay was only ~4 months)
- gozur88 9y agoThe problem is a six month delay pushes everybody's launch back six months. So if you had an interplanetary probe scheduled for the next Mars launch window in April of 2018, a six month delay starting today would mean your probe doesn't get launched until the next window in July of 2020 unless you have enough clout to bump other launches.