Space Force awards SpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin $13.7 billion in launch contracts
The Space Force yesterday awarded a combined $13.7 billion in launch contracts to SpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin, covering military launches through 2032.
The contracts, announced April 4 by the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command, are part of the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 Lane 2 procurement, a cornerstone initiative designed to bolster the Pentagon’s access to space for its most sensitive and risk-averse missions.
SpaceX emerged as the leading contractor, securing $5.9 billion in anticipated awards, followed by ULA at nearly $5.4 billion and Blue Origin at nearly $2.4 billion. The three companies are expected to collectively perform 54 launches under the agreement between fiscal years 2025 and 2029.
Based on the contracts, SpaceX will do 28 launches, ULA 19, and Blue Origin 7. Since these launches include many military payloads that must go on “risk-adverse” rockets, the distribution of launches makes sense. While SpaceX’s rockets (Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy) are well proven to be reliable, both ULA and Blue Origin launch with new rockets, Vulcan and New Glenn respectively, that have barely yet left the factory. Vulcan has done only two launches, with the second having technical issues (supposedly resolved). Blue Origin has done only one successful launch, though it failed to land the first stage as planned.
The distribution however serves the needs of both the military and the American rocket industry. It gives the Pentagon redundancy, multiple launch providers. And it gives America the same, three competing rocket companies striving for business and profit.
The result is going to be a very vibrant American space effort, doing a lot of things having nothing to do with the Pentagon.
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The Space Force yesterday awarded a combined $13.7 billion in launch contracts to SpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin, covering military launches through 2032.
The contracts, announced April 4 by the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command, are part of the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 Lane 2 procurement, a cornerstone initiative designed to bolster the Pentagon’s access to space for its most sensitive and risk-averse missions.
SpaceX emerged as the leading contractor, securing $5.9 billion in anticipated awards, followed by ULA at nearly $5.4 billion and Blue Origin at nearly $2.4 billion. The three companies are expected to collectively perform 54 launches under the agreement between fiscal years 2025 and 2029.
Based on the contracts, SpaceX will do 28 launches, ULA 19, and Blue Origin 7. Since these launches include many military payloads that must go on “risk-adverse” rockets, the distribution of launches makes sense. While SpaceX’s rockets (Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy) are well proven to be reliable, both ULA and Blue Origin launch with new rockets, Vulcan and New Glenn respectively, that have barely yet left the factory. Vulcan has done only two launches, with the second having technical issues (supposedly resolved). Blue Origin has done only one successful launch, though it failed to land the first stage as planned.
The distribution however serves the needs of both the military and the American rocket industry. It gives the Pentagon redundancy, multiple launch providers. And it gives America the same, three competing rocket companies striving for business and profit.
The result is going to be a very vibrant American space effort, doing a lot of things having nothing to do with the Pentagon.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
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4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
$250M per launch? Very vibrant indeed! Sounds like a fair profit for each of the companies.
Provided they don’t land in Chinese waters – that 34% tariff will cut the profit.
The award price averaged out per launch does sound high. But there’s a lot of “mission assurance” charges that DoD and NRO require that inflate those so much — highly sensitive payloads that require loads of security and a lot of TLC in handling and mounting the payloads.
Also, just look at what these missions were costing a decade ago, when only ULA was launching them. A Delta IV Heavy launch was running the Defense Department something like $500-600M.
At any rate, it’s nice to see SpaceX in the #1 slot, finally. They ought to have gotten it last time. This time around, DoD simply could not deny them.
Indeed!
So, now we have all of this in the two NSSL “lanes”:
Lane 2 (Risk averse missions, with each provider required to be able to handle all NSSL requirements):
SpaceX – Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy
United Launch Alliance – Vulcan Centaur
Blue Origin – New Glenn
Lane 1 (An “on–ramp” class, with less demanding missions):
SpaceX – Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy
United Launch Alliance – Vulcan Centaur
Blue Origin – New Glenn
Rocket Lab – Neutron
Stoke – Nova
That is light years beyond how things stood a decade ago, when the Air Force labored under a ULA monopoly.
It will be fascinating to see how well the Neutron’s approach to reusability works, and whether it scales up from middleweight-lift to heavy lift. It is apparently not 100% reusable, with an expendable 2nd stage, but the clamshell (AKA “hungry hippo”) fairing design may have advantages:
* simplifying the two problems of first-stage and fairing recovery into a single simpler problem
* encapsulating the second stage completely to allow it to be designed as more of a simple kick-stage, reducing the non-recoverable cost.
Whether these “simplifications” actually simplify, and thus lower the overhead of reusability, remains to be seen. I am skeptical, but Tori Bruno just about had me convinced that Falcon 9 was pointless too!
It has been pointed out to me, by the way, that one thing that drives up the average mission price is that in Phase III, all the cheap missions basically got shunted into Lane 1.
Don C.,
That was my first thought, too.
Split up, we see that the different launch companies are charging/receiving different launch rates:
Blue Origin: $2.4 for 7 launches, up to 45,000 kg per launch to low Earth Orbit (LEO), is $343 million per launch, or at least $7,600/kg.
SpaceX: $5.9 billion for 28 launches, up to 17,500 kg per launch to LEO (Falcon 9, when landing on drone ship), is $211 million per launch, or at least $12,000/kg (lower cost if Falcon Heavies are in the mix, with <50,000 kg per launch if core and boosters all are recovered, and even lower if Starship is in the mix for super-heavy payloads).
ULA $5.4 billion for 19 launches, up to 27,200 kg per launch to LEO, is $284 million per launch, or at least $10,500/kg
This divvy-up is interesting, to be sure, and probably includes at least some of the Space Force’s Proliferated Warfighter LEO constellation, though much of that will likely be covered by Lane 1.
But the just-arrived elephant in the room is Pres. Trump’s Golden Dome project. This will require launch mass quantities – mostly to LEO – that positively dwarf all other DoD launch tasking, which is all this newly-announced set of awards covers. Of necessity, the lion’s share of Golden Dome’s space-based components will have to ride uphill on Starships as nothing else can handle both the mass and time requirements of deploying such a system. So, what SpaceX’s actual share of DoD launch demand will be between now and 2032 is still very much TBD but it will be well north of 43%.
It is worth noting, also, that even with SpaceX getting the lion’s share of the additional Golden Dome-related launch demand, the remining “hyena’s share,” so to speak, will materially fatten the exchequers of all other DoD-qualified US-based launch providers as well.
But cadence will be the name of the game and I could easily see Blue taking the second-place share of this far larger DoD launch pie and Rocket Lab perhaps even edging out ULA for third place – always assuming Stoke, with the only other fully-reusable vehicle design on offer, doesn’t blow by everyone else but SpaceX. Relativity’s Terran-R, Firefly’s Medium Launch Vehicle and perhaps even Astra’s Launcher 4 could get into the mix in the next year or two as well via, at a minimum, on-ramping into Lane 1. Things will be spicy.