For more than 10 years, Lockheed Martin Corporation and Boeing Company have time and again, received contracts from various branches of the US military for the development and execution of various technologies.
Now, for the first time in a long time, one of those contracts is going to an outside competitor—Elon Musks’ SpaceX company, which just won an $83 million contract to launch a Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite on behalf of the US Air Force.
The deal will cover the production of a Falcon 9 rocket, spacecraft integration, launch operations, and spaceflight certification.
The GPS satellite is scheduled to launch in May 2018 from Florida.
The contract marks the military’s first competitively sourced launch service contract in more than a decade, and effectively ends the exclusive relationship between it and the United Launch Alliance (ULA), a partnership of Lockheed and Boeing.
It is worth pointing out that the ULA did not actually compete for the GPS launch contract. The Alliance cited accounting issues, implications of trade sanctions that limited imports of its rockets’ Russian-made engines, and – per the ULA’s vice president – SpaceX’s cut-rate pricing.
“This GPS III Launch Services contract award achieves a balance between mission success, meeting operational needs, lowering launch costs, and reintroducing competition for National Security Space missions,” Lieutenant General Samuel Greaves, who heads the Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center, said in a statement.
Between now and the 2018 launch date, the Air Force plans to solicit bids for eight additional satellite launches.
Via Reuters
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