On 04/05/2011 05:32 PM, Brian Thorn wrote:
On Tue, 5 Apr 2011 08:47:32 +0100, "Brian Gaff"
wrote:

But one has to ask, where is the money coming from for this?

Where is the money coming for what? It is a commercial project. Here
in America we can do pretty much whatever we want with our own money
or whatever money we can convince investors to cough up. The Falcon 1
experience is behind them, and Falcon 9 has so far looked pretty good.
SpaceX shouldn't have much trouble getting investors.

If Mr. Musk's company can build a rocket with twice the lift capacity
of Delta IV-Heavy at 25% the cost, it will kill off Delta IV just as
quickly as DoD/NRO can say "thank you for your service, there's the
door" and Atlas V will be relegated to a couple of launches per year
as the backup vehicle (no more dependance on Russian engines will be
hugely attractive to DoD.)

Atlas V can't carry the heaviest DoD/NRO payloads, since the Heavy was
never completed past CDR. I don't think DoD/NRO will be comfortable
without a backup vehicle for *all* payload classes, so they will have an
interesting choice between Delta (more expensive, but exists) versus
Atlas (cheaper but need to develop the Heavy).