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I agree on ULA. It will be hard for them to compete on price. And if the US military has two reliable launch-providers, there won't be room for a third heavy-li
by GMoromisato 1y ago
I agree on ULA. It will be hard for them to compete on price. And if the US military has two reliable launch-providers, there won't be room for a third heavy-lift vehicle.
But it will probably take a while for the "steamroller" to get going. For the next year or two it will seem to ULA as if everything is fine. And then they'll get flattened.
- originate9 1y agoAmazon and SpaceX--now the two biggest defense contractors... Silicon Valley is sure returning to its military roots.
- ethbr1 1y agoThe fact that SV was divorced from military spending for so long (80s-20s?) was really the anomaly. Which is to say that instead of leveraging SV, military funding went through the primes. The Steve Blank piece from Tuesday had a good summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45887699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45887699 tl;dr: a strategic military recognition that relying exclusively on full-custom, military-spec weapon systems is unaffordable (on either a dollar or time-to-develop basis), when your competitor is a vertically-integrated Chinese civilian+military procurement system