Historyczny już artykuł. Pewnie nic nowego. Elon Musk mówi o tym dlaczego dotychczasowe rakiety były drogie.
Podejście SpaceX może praktycznie wyeliminować z rynku komercyjnego Rosję i nie tylko.
Pozostali producenci rakiet nie mogą przechodzić obojętnie wobec działania SpaceX.
United Launch Alliance, the consortium of Boeing and Lockheed Martin that produces both the Delta and the Atlas, does not make its prices public. But budget documents show that in 2010 the EELV program received $1.14 billion for three rockets—an average of $380 million per launch. And prices are expected to rise significantly in the next few years, according to defense department officials. Why? Musk says a lot of the answer is in the government’s traditional “cost-plus” contracting system, which ensures that manufacturers make a profit even if they exceed their advertised prices. “If you were sitting at a n executive meeting at Boeing and Lockheed and you came up with some brilliant idea to reduce the cost of Atlas or Delta, you’d be fired,” he says. “Because you’ve got to go report to your shareholders why you made less money. So their incentive is to maximize the cost of a vehicle, right up to the threshold of cancellation.”
That’s a little overstated, says Stern. Yes, rockets are expensive largely “because the system allows it.” But in today’s economy, ULA’s military customers are calling for prices to come down. “I know that they have an incentive to reduce their cost,” Stern says, “but it’s at the margin.” In other words, ULA’s cost-saving efforts are limited by the high overhead associated with traditional ways of building and launching rockets.
http://www.airspacemag.com/space/is-spacex-changing-the-rocket-equation-132285884/?no-istHowever, during his remarks Wednesday, Tobey offered a sharply different view of that contract. "ULA opted to not bid that," he said. "The government was not happy with us not bidding that contract because they felt that they had bent over backwards to lean the fill to our advantage. But... we saw it as a cost shootout between us and SpaceX. So now we're going to have to figure out how to bid these things at a much lower cost. And the government can't just say ULA has a great track record, they've done 105 launches in a row with 100 percent mission success, and we can give it to them on a silver platter even though their costs are two or three times as high."
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/03/ula-executive-admits-company-cannot-compete-with-spacex-on-launch-costs/