With space tourism closer, fight for contracts hotter
WASHINGTON — For a decade, there was only one company for the Pentagon to turn to its launch its satellites into space: the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing known as the United Launch Alliance.
A few years ago, Elon Musk’s SpaceX ended the company’s lucrative monopoly, after suing for the right to compete for the launches. Now, two more companies are building rockets that would be capable of vying for the launch contracts, which can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars each.
Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, and Orbital ATK, the outfit that already launches cargo to the International Space Station for NASA and does a lot of Pentagon business, are eyeing the contracts, company officials said. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
The launch market has gone through a disruption period, led by SpaceX, in an effort to lower the cost of getting to space. With all that’s changing, Bob Smith, Blue Origin’s chief executive officer said in a recent interview that, “I don’t think that the past is a good predictor of the future,” which he said was true for the commercial satellite market as well.
Quiet and obsessively secretive for years, Blue Origin has more recently started to emerge from the shadows. Last year, it announced its first customers for its New Glenn rocket, which is set to launch for the first time in 2020.
Company officials have met with Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson at the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. And in March, Bezos tweeted a picture of himself meeting with Betty Sapp, the director of the National Reconnaissance Office.
“We cheer every new entrant who’s brave enough to go into the space business,” Sapp said in a tweet.
But Blue Origin is not the only new entrant. Orbital ATK, which recently announced its OmegA rocket, plans to bid on national security launch contracts. While not as well known as some of its competitors, it has a long heritage and is set to be acquired later this year by Northrop Grumman.
“We don’t want to be the dark horse any more,” said Orbital ATK spokesman Barron Beneski. “We’re in it to win it.”
In addition to competing for national security launches, Blue Origin is also competing against Virgin Galactic to take paying tourists to the edge of space. For years, Virgin’s owner, Richard Branson, has been salivating at the prospect of turning ordinary people into astronauts — for a cost, at least initially, of $250,000 a ticket.
Smith said Blue Origin’s first test flight, with people, could come by the end of this year from its site in West Texas. The company hasn’t announced a price for tourists, or when commercial operations would begin.
But he said that the company is also eager to get ordinary people into the vastness of space.
“I’m completely supportive of all kinds of people going into space. I mean that’s the whole point of what we’re trying to go do,” he said.