In article ,
says...

On 2018-05-20 16:58, Fred J. McCall wrote:

They've only launched half a dozen of them, for Christ's sake! The
fourth launch failed catastrophically and led to a temporary stand
down of some duration. To use it for commercial launches someone
would need to contract with them for a commercial launch. It's early
days...

Considering they are in production for ISS cargo launches, I would have
expected them to seek out comemrcial launches and be in the news for
winning such contracts.

Or does the Virginia/Maryland launch latitude result in sufficient cargo
penalty for GTO that they can't compete?

Antares has a solid upper stage. I'd bet it would be terrible at
launching GTO payloads. Antares is optimized for commercial cargo. So
LEO payloads would be fine, but beyond that, not so much.

You know, this stuff is not hard to find out. I looked for less than
five minutes. Look into Prometheus, Adeline and Ariane 6.

I checked Wikipedia entry for ESA and didn't find any text on future
launchers. Would have expected this to be in that one.

Google broken? Seriously, they've been all over the news for several
years because Falcon 9 has literally made Ariane 5 obsolete on price.

You mean ULA, which is the space business spun off by Boeing and
Lockheed. The only thing they'll have that SpaceX doesn't is that
they're not SpaceX.

I cases where a payload and orbital inclination means SpaceX can't land
the booster, woudln't ULA become on a less unequal footing than SpaceX ?

SpaceX has Falcon Heavy for those missions. Core and boosters can be
reused for all but the heaviest payloads and most energetic
trajectories.

In cases where Boeing makes the staellite and uses ULA, could this
become more competitively priced (a "bundle") as opposed to Boeing
making satellite and using SpaceX to launch?

LOL, no. ULA is a separate entity that has its own accounting. This
isn't likely to happen. Boeing is only part owner of ULA.

I realise ULA will be more expensive than SpaceX but if there are
situations where the price difference in no longer orders of magnitutes,
then perhaps ULA still has some market niche.

Only until another provider is certified for EELV launches. My bet is
Orbital ATK with their Next Generation Launcher which looks to be closer
to flying than New Glenn.

All this stuff is all over the space news websites. You might want to
read up on it. Wikipedia clearly isn't helping.

Jeff
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