"Much of this newsletter is sealed to protect the competitive secrets of SpaceX and the other bidders, but redacted filings give us a clue about what Musk and company are upset about," he said Thursday.The piece made note of SpaceX's public absence when it should be "a crowning moment" for the company, given its years of effort to even compete for those government contracts. We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us.
So when Russia began its invasion of Crimea, the company sprang at the chance to sue the Air Force over its use of the Atlas V rocket — a ULA vehicle that relied on sanctioned Russian-made engines.Musk also publicly attacked the price of ULA's missions. Among space enthusiasts, Musk and the company he founded, SpaceX, are the disrupters, the swashbuckling innovators whose cheap, reusable rockets will pave the way for an explosion of orbital commerce and creativity. At the time, well-funded and established rocket-industry players like Boeing and Lockheed Martin more or less shrugged.Yet as SpaceX's top engineers toiled to build the company's first rocket system, called Falcon 1, Musk used what tools he could to fight a powerful traditional grip on the industry and break in.Boeing and Lockheed had won a previous iteration of NSSL, called the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program, and it anointed them as the sole two companies certified to launch military satellites. (Jeff Foust of SpaceNews wrote that SpaceX "Fernholz speculated about possible reasons why SpaceX would stay mum, ranging from not yet having received a debrief from the DoD on how the contract decisions were made, to the rocket company's Musk, who apparently read the newsletter, replied to Fernholz's tweet by blasting SpaceX's co-awardee, ULA. Tory Bruno, ULA's CEO, responded to Musk by congratulating SpaceX on its award. "Efficiently reusable rockets are all that matter for making life multiplanetary & 'space power,'" Musk ULA did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.However, Bruno — the company's CEO — publicly weighed in on the matter a couple of hours after Musk's criticisms. ULA is a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Sign up now for Insider Today for regular insights and analysis from Henry Blodget & David Plotz. Elon Musk is feeling confident following last week’s Maybe that plan works out, but I will seriously eat my hat with a side of mustard if that rocket flies a national security spacecraft before 2023This comment came after ULA CEO Tory Bruno corrected a tweet by Musk that compared the costs associated with Falcon Heavy and Delta IV Heavy. While Bruno's presence in the space industry may not be as flashy as other leaders like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, he is an influential figure who will help shape the coming decades of space exploration. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 12, 2018. "This contract is costing the US taxpayers billions of dollars for no reason," Musk In 2018, he assailed ULA's lucrative launch defense contracts, claiming they are "On Thursday, Musk again attacked ULA over its traditional Atlas V and Delta IV rockets, which are not reusable and the Air Force plans not to fly after 2022 and 2023, respectively. That cost includes a "fixed price Launch Service Support for each company for the first 12 months of the contract," an Air Force spokesperson told Business Insider in ane email — likely to help cover the cost of a new Meanwhile, ULA's first two missions will cost about $169 million each, according to When a Twitter user brought up ULA's historically higher price point — the company has received many years of launch service support awards — Bruno Each spy satellite can cost a billion dollars or more to build, so a sterling launch record appears to count a lot in divvying up contract awards, too.ULA has launched 140 space missions in a row without failure, the latest of which was a "[Defense department customers] don't care whether [the launch cost] is $100 million or $300 million; it's in the noise," Alan Stern, a former NASA associate administrator and leader of the New Horizons mission to Pluto, The Air Force led the procurement process and is preparing for protests to the agreement by Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman, NOW WATCH: Why Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are in an epic feud that's lasted years