Dependence on SpaceX has been a concern for the Pentagon, which wants multiple vendors of rides to orbit.
The important part about this is that Vulcan doesn’t just use yet another Russian bought rocket engine. It uses BE-4, from Blue Origin. Finally, someone other than SpaceX building rockets. Too bad it’s the other out of touch billionaire with too much power and influence that is doing it.
Right? What could possibly go wrong by putting our future in space in the hands of a bunch of narcissistic dickbag billionaires?
Nobody ever said it we start spreading into space, we won’t be taking all our current problems with us. Star Trek kinda gave us a rosy vision.
It’s probably going to be more like the Expanse but more violent, oppressive, and jingoistic.
The expanse makes it very clear that there was no shortage of space oppression before the events that occur in the books
Rosy? Star Trek said we had to go through a nuclear apocalyptic war before learning to cooperate.
SYLRC (Support Your Local Rocket Company) Seriously though, there’s a lot of new ones coming online and/or developing: Stoke, Astra, Relativity, Rocket Lab, etc… Yeah, it sucks that two of the behemoths are ran by egomaniacal sociopaths, but some of the other ones are bringing some cool tech and innovation to the table, and even getting government contracts.
Well… Capability wise there’s still a huge gap between SpaceX and all the rest. The Vulcan is only competition for Falcon 9 because the DoD wants an alternative at all cost.
Yeah, this is not a competitor in terms of cost or launch cadence. Just good to have any second option.
It’s not really able to compete with SpaceX on price. But with customers like the DOD or Kuiper, there’s probably a market for someone who isn’t SpaceX.
they can compete in very specific cases - like heavy load to GTO. Falcon Heavy would require full expenditure of all 3 cores to match, which wouldn’t be much cheaper. Plus the larger fairing size helps with certain kinds of satellites.
Yeah, but gto with fairings bigger then even the extended falcon heavy fairing willing to accept higher costs is a very narrow use case, I doubt it would support the whole vehicle. I’m guessing they will get quite a bit of business from trying to diversity away from SpaceX though.
the point is that it isn’t higher cost for those missions. Falcon Heavy will have to run at 100% expended mode which is nearly the same cost as Vulcan.
And some missions and payloads outright exclude falcon Heavy, period. High orbit and/or large satellites.
