JF Mezei wrote on Sat, 19 May 2018
00:26:09 -0400:

On 2018-05-18 06:24, Jeff Findley wrote:

follow. It just won't be the typical government contractors like ULA or
Orbital ATK who are so set in their ways they simply can't attempt
something so "out of the box". It's just not in their corporate DNA
anymore to truly innovate.


I wouldn't write the big guys off yet.


Of course you wouldn't.


As long as customers were buying their expensive disposable rockets,
they were making lots of money. Why invest in new tech that would reduce
profits?


Because it lets you increase profits. That sort of short sighted
thinking cost them a big chunk of the airliner market.


Boeing Commecrcial had periods of stagnation where it didn't see a need
to respond to McD/Lockheed and later to Airbus, but periods where Boeing
responded with major new products (747 in response to DC-10 and L1011,
the 767 in response to A300, and the 777 in response to Airbus A330/340,
and later the 787 in response to the 330 stealing 767 customers.


Yes, but intermittent stupidity in one part of the business (which is
what that was) may be a good indicator of how the rest of the business
will think.


I think ULA dismissed SpaceX as a fad that wouldn't succeed. By the time
SpaceX proved it could do it (probably in 2017, so recent), the big guys
woke up to the fact that they are WAY late.


More like 2014.


Their advantage is they can continue to lobby their way with lucrative
military contracts for a number of years during which they develop a
competitor to SpaceX. One advantage of being late is that you know what
you have to beat. If SpaceX can r-use a rocket on average 3 times, then
Boeing doing it 4 times will beat SpaceX.


That's going to have to be a pretty large number of years. Their
future (Vulcan) will never be more than 'partially reusable'. And an
organization like ULA is going to need a much bigger advantage than
that to approach SpaceX prices because their internal costs are so
much higher.


(I know the spec s say 10, but we don't know what the average re=use
rate will be before at least a year or two).


Well, it will be hard to reuse one ten times in the next year or two
just because of constraints of launch rates.


Consider a Boeing rocket that has more fuel, which means for difficult
missions, it can still come back and land, whereas SpaceX has to ditch
the stage for such missions.


Consider magic pixie dust for fuel and unicorns for the first stage.


Or, Boeing could get out of commercial launches and leave the bsuiness
to SPaceX and Blue Origin, and just keep ultra secret military launches
where price is not an issue.


Except price for military launches IS an issue and SpaceX is already
certified for such launches.


The other variable to cosnider is lauinch availability. If SpaceX gets a
contract to launch 300 satellites in a year, it may not have any spare
capacity for otherc ontracts which wil have to go to someone else.
(exagerating rates here, but when one can launch starts to matter when a
launch is much delayed).


If there are signs that SpaceX will get any particular number of
launches (even your numbers) they will build to that capacity.

Your position seems to be that ULA can survive on crumbs and niche
contracts. That's just insane.


--
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar
territory."
--G. Behn