“ULA has never come up against a company like SpaceX, and frankly no one else has either,” said Marco Caceres, senior space analyst at Teal Group. “Every time they go after a segment of the market, everyone says they’ll never do it. And then they do it.”
After SpaceX won U.S. Air Force certification to bid for national security missions, ULA skipped the first competition for the launches last year. A former alliance executive caused a flap with his critical assessment of that contest and of Arizona Senator John McCain, who has sought to limit imports of the Russian-made engines that fire the alliance’s Atlas V rockets.
McCain questioned whether there was Pentagon “favoritism” toward ULA, and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter ordered the department’s inspector general to investigate.
"Absolutely we will cooperate. We have nothing to hide,” Bruno said of the probe.
Price Counts
The alliance opted not to bid in part because entries were judged on price rather than track records. Another provision focused on cost disclosures. The criteria hadn’t been included in previous contracts and “put us at a competitive disadvantage,” Bruno said.
Neither ULA and SpaceX make financial details public. Under Bruno, ULA has cut in half the time it takes to build and launch the Atlas V. Along with renegotiated supplier contracts, the changes reduced launch costs by about one-third from a $184 million baseline. Bruno aims to bring those costs below $100 million by 2019.
That’s still way above the $61 million base price that SpaceX lists on its website for a launch. Musk is ramping up the pricing pressure even further by focusing on lowering operating costs, which AlixPartners estimates are already about 50 percent below those of its rivals.
Vulcan Rocket
United Launch Alliance is preparing a new rocket, known as the Vulcan, to stay in the game. The first flight is planned by 2019.