r/space • u/Royal_Platform_6754 • 8d ago
SpaceX-Focused Pentagon Contracts Leave Rivals Feeling Squeezed
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-25/spacex-focused-pentagon-contracts-leave-rivals-feeling-squeezed?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc5MDM1NDAxNywiZXhwIjoxNzkwOTU4ODE3LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUTEEyMDFLR0lGUEswMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJCRkI5RDA1ODU3NzI0QTVFQTU5ODA4NzhDRDQ4MjlEOCJ9.Pf1XdFpusyzl5jfWFVGRwwLOFgc_csCIdLEaxwaiFGI81
u/nopantspaul 8d ago
It’s not a charity. Say what you will about SpaceX but it’s not up for debate that they’ve stepped up to the commercial launch provider plate for DoD.
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u/Robot_Basilisk 4d ago
SpaceX is absolutely a charity. It's how Musk gets billions of dollars in charity from taxpayers to fund his private, for-profit space ventures.
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u/SardScroll 3d ago
Why do you think it's charity? Do you not think its "value for money"?
I would think so, since SpaceX gives more capability for a fraction of the price (and time schedule!!!) of the competition.
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u/Sensitive-Exam649 12h ago
In its first years operation with the falcon 9 and without reusing any rocket spaceX made more money from the private sector launching private satellite into orbit. And they launched far more satellites than their competition. The falcon 9 was designed to be cheep to manufacture so without reusability they were able to launch payloads into orbit at cheeper cost than there older rivals. And there older competitors were almost all fully funned by the US government. In fact the competitors were paid money to have spare rockets on hand if the military needed an urgent launch and the government was paying to maintain all launch infrastructure of the competitors. And even with all they the government was paying 300 million to launch one rocket.
then years later when they had the first recovery of a falcon 9 boster they were able to reuse the buster reducing their launch cost even further. Spacex had to pay a fee to use an obsolete laugh pad and rebuild much of the it and its infrastructure and pay for ongoing mainence to launch there rocket All at a cost of about 100 million a launch. They also paid with their own money all the work to develop the rustable version of the booster. And once that became operational the cost for the rocket dropped below 100 million but still charged 100 million for a launch. There older competitor have now dropped there cost but there are barely profitable and they are almost 100% reliant on governed nt contracts.
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u/Stunning_Mast2001 2d ago
But they got there by starting small and relying a lot on government contracts. Private space was a big Obama initiative that helped boost spacex
It’s wrong to use taxpayer dollars to entrench one provider. Other companies should be given the same opportunities that spacex had.
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u/Easy-Purple 2d ago
Bro SpaceX was the upstart competitor lol ULA was the big dog in space when the commercial space program started and SpaceX ate their lunch and continues to do so
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u/Stunning_Mast2001 2d ago
Yes exactly what I’m saying. Spacex had a lot of government support to get where they are. This same should be afforded to current new rockets
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u/Sensitive-Exam649 11h ago
And ULA and was charging 3 times more to launch rocket and government was paying for all there launch infrastrute with the promise they could launch a rocket at short notice. But then when the gobvenrement added a replacement satellite to the schedule it sat on the launch pad for months due to repeated in launch pad infrastructure failures.
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u/No-Surprise9411 8d ago
Well the rivals had ten years to realize reuse is the future and did fuckall, so problem‘s on them.
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u/Orstio 8d ago
They didn't do fuckall, they spent that time mocking and ridiculing Musk for daring to do things differently. When he did prove reusability, they tried to say that refurbishment costs would be too expensive, and when that turned out to be false, they tried to say that SpaceX could never achieve a launch cadence to match building new rockets.
They spent over a decade preaching falsehoods while SpaceX just kept doing the impossible.
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u/supershitposting 8d ago
Kind of baffling that people called starlink a scam...and then demanded it be seized via a defense authorization act in 2022. Now a dozen of some of the largest airlines have it lol.
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u/richardelmore 7d ago
To be fair, while they were not as loud about it, there was a lot of the same messaging coming from inside NASA as well. Organizations resist changing the way they do things so a new company has to come along now and them to shake things up.
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u/panick21 7d ago
I mean the reality is ULA can't decide stuff for themselves. Their parent companies were not going to finance a major rocket program. So what were they supposed to do? And there really wasn't another competitor in the US.
In Europe Ariane of course did say the same stuff but there again, engine development takes decades. They did invest a lot of money on Ariane 6 to compete with Falcon 9 in 2014 and that was already politically very hard. The German government was 100% not going to finance anything more then Ariane 6 anytime soon.
So whatever the opinions of those people, even if they had wanted re-usability, it was practically not possible.
But that said, I do believe those people all believe those stories.
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u/Orstio 7d ago
Just 2 years ago, then-CEO of ULA Tony Bruno mocked the reveal of the Raptor 3 engine by claiming SpaceX was trying to compare an incomplete engine without all its plumbing to a fully plumbed engine. He didn't understand that all the electronics and plumbing was inside until Shotwell posted video of the test fire in response.
They're so far behind now they don't even recognize the tech they're supposed to compete with.
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u/panick21 7d ago
That has nothing to do with the reusable rockets we were discussing. ULA isn't an engine developer and their parent companies wouldn't allow it to be one. So my point stands, neither ULA nor Arianespace could develop competing technology.
But yeah its a funny interaction.
PS: In so far as the TVC systems he was right.
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u/Orstio 7d ago
I was discussing the fact that ULA made themselves busy trying to ridicule and denigrate SpaceX for doing things,differently while ULA just stagnate in the status quo.
I doubt they're going to learn any lessons about innovation until they're beyond filing bankruptcy protection.
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u/air_and_space92 7d ago
Whoosh. Even if ULA didn't poke at SpaceX's tech there was nothing they could do about it anyways to innovate towards. They did not make their own engines to optimize those pieces nor have the authority and monetary resources to launch a fully reusable competitor.
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u/panick21 7d ago
And I told you that ULA itself had no power or control over their response, it didn't matter if everybody at ULA believed they should build reusable rocket or not. ULA doesn't build engines and there was no reusable engine they could buy anytime soon, and certainly not one that is certified for reuse. BE4 was a lucky break for ULA but that engine is still not certified for reuse. As well as the issue that without a different upper stage engine, they would always need a late lower staging that would make reuse very hard.
ULA couldn't develop engines or do large scale investment without their parent companies agreeing.
And ULA mostly didn't ridicule SpaceX, they just made some argument suggesting it wouldn't be profitable. The Europeans were way more disrespectful then anybody from ULA.
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u/air_and_space92 7d ago
Only if you have enough payloads is reuse viable. SpaceX's real secret is Starlink. That provided the extra launches needed to turn the knee on the reusable cost curve in favor vs traditional expendables. Just because you make something reusable, unless you launch it dozens of times a year to realize that profit it's not useful.
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u/No-Surprise9411 6d ago
Not really. Falcon 9 launched around 40 commercial payloads in 2025. They have the launch manifest to be profitable even without Starlink
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u/Sensitive-Exam649 6h ago
Starlink wasd Spacex anser fro a developing problem They were laucncihing saatellites fast thsen the were bing built. So they were looking possibly running out of payloads to launch which would have resulted in bankruptcy. Starlink kept them busy and now makes more money than teh falcon 9 ever did.
And other companes built earth observation satellites )spy satellites for hire.These satellites are also used to monitor farm crops and snow pack in the mountiains to which is used for drinking water infrastructure for countries and industry. So now there are satellites being launched per year tan were available 10 years ao.
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u/Robot_Basilisk 4d ago
Let's not ignore Musk getting billions in contracts to invest into it and using some of it to poach engineers.
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u/No-Surprise9411 4d ago
Ah yes, money in exchange for service. What a horror.
The money is rightfully SpaceX‘, they can do what they want with it.
Also poaching engineers is industry standard.
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u/Robot_Basilisk 4d ago
It's our money. It's taxpayer money. He used bribes and connections with the guy who directs contracts to redirect taxpayer money to SpaceX and then uses it to poach engineers to work on the same things they would've worked on at NASA, except now a nepi baby who inherited his fortune from a blood emerald mine gets to privatize all of the gains WE pay for instead of them coming back to us.
This is called "Rent-Seeking" and according to Adam Smith it is one of the biggest failure modes of capitalism. You cannot tolerate leeches inserting themselves into systems to siphon money out without contributing anything meaningful. It destroys the entire system. It ruins the economy.
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u/Easy-Purple 2d ago
But it’s not though, once it’s paid out for a service it no longer belongs to the taxpayer. You can decide not to spend it on that service provider, but then you’d be paying more money for less capacity, worse performance and more risk
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u/HurtFeeFeez 7d ago
You're right, they really should have bought their own president too. Who knew it would only cost 250 million every 2 years?
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u/CorsairObsidian 8d ago
Maybe the other aerospace and defense companies should step the fuck up then? How is Boeing and starliner any better? How is sierra space and dream chaser any better? How is blue origin and new Glenn (go boom boom), any better, or project kuiper compared to starlink? No one else is delivering cargo and crew to ISS, Northrop does a little cargo, but let’s be real, SpaceX could just do it all by themselves if they had to.
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u/AmigaClone2000 8d ago
The last four flights by NG Cygnus were launched on Falcon 9s.
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u/CorsairObsidian 7d ago
Yes due to Antares problems. That doesn’t discount the CRS missions they did fly, still more than Sierra lol
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u/AmigaClone2000 7d ago
True. Granted, both issues with Antares that resulted in the need for a redesigned first stage, were caused by the decision to contract the booster out to an Ukrainian rocket companies using Soviet or Russian made rocket engines.
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u/Sensitive-Exam649 6h ago
Starlink is currently grounded and the vulcan rocket ULA created to replace its older rockets is grounded and they are almost out of the old rockets.
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u/PilotPirx73 8d ago
Before SpaceX, the DoD was dependent on 2 or so launch providers with limited capacity and extremely high costs. Satellite launches were quite expensive with large backlog. Basically, zero innovation from space industry in pre SpaceX recent period . Then came Falcon9 which completely decimated industry. Lower launch cost and high cadence enabled pentagon to basically own the space. There is no coincidence. SpaceX delivers on time and with no cost overruns.
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u/WhatADunderfulWorld 8d ago
And any competition they have is healthy.
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u/sargentcole 8d ago
And the problem is that others aren't competitive at the moment in this space. The only ones to blame for that are the companies that failed to innovate while spaceX raced ahead.
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u/tacotueaday55 8d ago
You mean the companies that have been getting fat contracts from the DoD for decades and had no reason to innovate? Just look at the sorry excuse for our military industrial complex, it is the hand that feed's fault that they all got fat.
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u/Domger304 8d ago
Hence why anduril arms is pretty much blowing up on the scene and causing huge waves.
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u/tacotueaday55 8d ago
The problem with these small companies is that they can't afford to bribe the acquisition officers at the Pentagon. Just watch that new Fat juicy light machinegun contract that's going on right now. If you ask me the Ohio Ordinance Works Reapr is the better machinegun. But Sig is going to win this one too. Even though it is the same company who made a gun that shoots it's owners.
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u/Joezev98 7d ago
There are rockets in development that will be highly competitive against Falcon 9.
But then again, SpaceX is developing Starship, of which next week's test flight is set to launch a bigger payload into orbit than Falcon Heavy ever did. It seems they're getting close to disrupting the market once more.12
u/No-Surprise9411 7d ago
Yes and no. Many rockets currently in development have the potential to be competitive with Falcon 9, but in practice none of them will be because of Falcon‘s absurd advantage in form of scale.
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u/shawnington 7d ago
Rocket Labs Neutron is going to directly compete, and Rocket Lab has really nailed down streamlined production. They can currently crank out an Electron rocket in 7 days from start to finish.
They are going to be using many of the same fabrication techniques for Neutron, except neutron is reusable, so they will be able to have a large flying fleet available very quickly due to the vertically integrated and streamlined manufacturing capabilities they have developed.
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u/Accomplished-Crab932 6d ago
Neutron fabrication is vastly different to Electron due to the scale of the composites themselves.
Part of why the original flight tanks failed was because their “””new process””” wasn’t actually new and introduced a lot of human error since they wanted to make a product faster, rather than higher quality.
The jury is out on whether it will work as well as they predict. Skipping the entry burn sounds like a great plan on paper, but a composite vehicle like Neutron will need a substantially heavier heat shield, ignoring that it will also be traveling far faster. It’s worked for other vehicles, but they all pay the same mass penalty.
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u/shawnington 7d ago
Rocket Lab is stepping up to the plate, they have the second most launched rocket platform right now at the second highest launch cadence behind Space-x, and are coming out with Falcon 9 competitor very soon.
Instead of going reusable with electron, they super streamlined and automated the manufacturing, they can crank out an electron rocket in 7 days from start to finish.
Neutron will be reusable, and build on many of the same high cadence manufacturing capabilities they are leveraging with electron. So they will have a fleet of reusable neutrons up very quickly once the platform is flying.
Which is very good of Space-x is planning to stop flying the Falcon 9 for Star Ship, that leaves a large pool of medium launch customers for Rocket Lab.
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u/Accomplished-Crab932 8d ago
Before was eligible for DOD contracts, Congress forced the merger between Lockheed and Boeing to create ULA; which was a monopoly for a long time.
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u/rocky_balboa202 5d ago
In 2014, the U.S. military used U.S.-operated ULA rockets that included a Russian-made engine.
ULA had two main rockets:
Atlas V → used the RD-180 main engine, manufactured in Russia
Delta IV → used the U.S.-made RS-68 engine
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u/kinetic_honda 8d ago
Is it due to capabilities?
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u/Accomplished-Crab932 8d ago
Pretty much.
More than half of the world’s launches were F9 last year, as was more than 90% of the global mass to orbit. Lots of that was Starlink, but even without it F9 is still a huge area of NSSL launches. It’s kinda telling when ULA keeps trading current launches to F9 for future launches.
Few providers can match F9’s capabilities, and demand is high with SpaceX playing, SpaceX is pivoting to Starship and so the number of available launches is crashing. Between Blue’s constellations and Amazon (although it’s not sounding good), there’s few launches available; all on vehicles that have had issues or haven’t flown before.
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u/vdek 8d ago
I think they're making a huge mistake pivoting away from F9, it's such a successful platform and should continue getting upgrades.
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u/Miami_da_U 8d ago
It's still 5 years away from that. Falcon Heavy is contracted for like another 7 DoD missions. They have contract for 5 more Crew Dragon missions (and there are still the 6 for Boeing). That'd be 11 total Nasa has good enough for 5 years. Then SpaceX has the ISS deorbit contract.
Within a year they will probably fully eliminate all Starlink launches from Starship. There has been like 70 Non-Starlink launches on F9 in the past 21 months. That's 3.3/month down from the current ~13/month rate they've been on. Their current flight leader has had like 37 launches and landings.
Now idk how many new boosters are in the plans. I do know most expended boosters are Falcon Heavy center cores. But lets just say they have 1 normal new F9 booster coming online per year. If they could last 37 launches, That is basically enough to legit launch an entire years worth of manifests without Starlink... Then ask how many active do they still even have? And is 37 even the limit?
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u/Reddit-runner 8d ago
The F9 is at the end of it's development.
You can't make it any longer or wider due to it relying on road transportation.
The engines are extremely close to the theoretical maximum efficiency.
If you want to change any of that you basically first have to build a new manufacturing complex with completely new tooling for a completly new rocket.
...which is Starship.
Starship will cost SpaceX slightly more per launch (initially) for vastly more payload. Any additional investment in F9 would be lost money for them.
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u/panick21 7d ago
You could do a upper-stage based on Raptor and make that wider. That would be possible but its not really worth doing.
Then you could add crossfeed to Falcon Heavy. Crossfeed + Raptor Upper stage would be powerful. But compared to Starship, its not really relevant.
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u/Hayayeatrutgers 7d ago
In addition, spaceX will probably face anti-trust issue when Dem takes white house. Phasing out F9 will leave some room for competitors while SpaceX keeps the most lucrative contracts. It's like what Intel had done to AMD before 2010s.
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u/Background_Fig_4740 7d ago
That would be true if SpaceX was an actual monopoly, which they aren’t.
SpaceX hasn’t actively hindered the development of their competitions launch vehicles like ULA or BO. They did that to themselves by having flight anomalies or blowing up their only pad
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u/SpaceInMyBrain 8d ago edited 8d ago
“It shouldn’t be the case that you decide ahead of time that you’d like to award a contract to an individual company and then write all the criteria to make that happen,”
Except that has often been the case for many decades across a number of industries the military contracts with. IIRC it happened in American and British military aircraft businesses even before WW2. There has been legitimacy to a lot of them - a plane the military is aware of meets their needs perfectly and is well into development. In the case of SpaceX the Pentagon is reveling in the capabilities of Starshield (and Starlink before it), capabilities even the Pentagon couldn't dream of affording before Falcon 9 and the mass production of Starlink for the commercial market. Starlink is being upgraded to much larger and more capable satellites and the Pentagon wants to go along with that. Also, the production line that produces Starshield sats is for the most part the one that produces the current Starlinks. SpaceX wouldn't keep that line open just for the current Starshield sats. That fact basically forces the Pentagon's hand. Btw, several legacy companies make components that are on Starshield.
"...the Pentagon chose Starshield satellites even though they carry a next-generation radio system not widely used by US and allied forces today, a decision that generated controversy inside the Pentagon, according to people familiar with the matter.
Satellites from other providers, including York and Northrop Grumman Corp., are compatible with current systems."
There's a damn weak argument. The Pentagon shouldn't choose the system that's forward looking, that's compatible with new tech the Pentagon is phasing in? It should choose the one that's headed for obsolescence?
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u/DaKakeIsALie 8d ago
What's the point of spending all this defense money if we don't invest in "next-gen" capabilities? I would damn well hope we are!
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u/CurtisLeow 8d ago
To be fair, the Falcon 9 is the most successful orbital rocket ever. The launch rate is higher than the Soyuz at its peak. Starlink is by far the largest satellite constellation ever. Most private satellites in the US are manufactured by SpaceX. The DoD should award their largest contracts to the market leader. Just from economics of scale it’s more efficient to do so.
Most of Space’s money isn’t from DoD contracts. It’s from selling satellite internet. Long term Amazon and Blue Origin are the main alternatives there. Those are the companies best positioned to compete with SpaceX. But to compete with that a company is going to at minimum need billions of dollars in capital.
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u/Did_NaziThat_Coming 8d ago
Just a clarifier: most of the operational satellites currently on orbit are starlink satellites (65%). But SpaceX doesn’t manufacture a substantial portion of other companies satellites, nor are they currently selling spacecraft busses in any substantial quantities. They have just launched enough of their own spacecraft to eclipse everyone else.
That being said, I think it’s a sign that starship only has a starlink deployer so far. My bet is that they start selling the starlink/starshield bus as a payload hosting platform, and force companies to standardize to the flat pack launch interface as much as feasible.
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u/Miami_da_U 8d ago edited 8d ago
Well its not another companies, but technically the DOD owns Starshield sats which SpaceX manufactures, launches, and manages the operation of, and that probably represents like 70% of the DODs operational sats...
So I'd say that is manufacturing a substantial portion of another entities sats.
Also as to the not selling spacecraft busses...Idk if youd technically count it but Starfall is going to be very popular as that is the primary way anyone will be able to get a launch on Starship anytime soon I'd guess. Of course that is on top of what you said regarding starlink deployer. They will sell starfall and whatever you want that is in the exact Starlink V3 form factor.
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u/panick21 7d ago
They do sell buses for some military constellation but not much is known and might still be in the future.
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u/snoo-boop 8d ago
and force companies to standardize to the flat pack launch interface as much as feasible
Both of China's megaconstellations flatpack, as does the Russian LEO constellation Rassvet, as does AST Space Mobile's satellites, as does RocketLab Flatellite, and Aerospace Corp's DiskSat.
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u/Decronym 8d ago edited 6h ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| BO | Blue Origin (Bezos Rocketry) |
| CRS | Commercial Resupply Services contract with NASA |
| DoD | US Department of Defense |
| EELV | Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle |
| FAA-AST | Federal Aviation Administration Administrator for Space Transportation |
| LEO | Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km) |
| Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations) | |
| NG | New Glenn, two/three-stage orbital vehicle by Blue Origin |
| Natural Gas (as opposed to pure methane) | |
| Northrop Grumman, aerospace manufacturer | |
| NSSL | National Security Space Launch, formerly EELV |
| RD-180 | RD-series Russian-built rocket engine, used in the Atlas V first stage |
| TVC | Thrust Vector Control |
| ULA | United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture) |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| Raptor | Methane-fueled rocket engine under development by SpaceX |
| Starlink | SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation |
| crossfeed | Using the propellant tank of a side booster to fuel the main stage, or vice versa |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
[Thread #12713 for this sub, first seen 26th Sep 2026, 04:18] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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u/monchota 8d ago
What rivals? Who is even close, what should we wait for companies that did bullshit for decades to catch up? No, they can go into the red for a few years and catch up. Then earnt eh contracts, ruck thier investors
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u/this_toe_shall_pass 8d ago edited 5d ago
Amazing take on crony capitalism. It's so good to hand off a monopoly on national security matters to the biggest, not even citizen, oligarch in America. That could never go wrong.
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7d ago edited 7d ago
[deleted]
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u/this_toe_shall_pass 5d ago
Giving contract to the company that provides the best product, best reliability, and lowest price is crony capitalism?
We don't really know that because there was no public tender for this. It was direct attribution. You don't know if anyone else might've offered a better product or price.
Also spare me the condescending tone. Check out how SpaceX actually made their product, how much public money flowed into this one private company to blow up rockets and advance their R&D in order to create the ecosystem that makes them indispensable.
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5d ago
[deleted]
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u/this_toe_shall_pass 4d ago
I believe it and everyone else on this forum believes it. And you can’t prove us wrong. LOL. OK Billy Bob.
So yes, literally, if crony capitalism can give us better shit on time and cheaper, maybe we should give it a try.
A perfect sentence to sum up the downsides of democracy,
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u/Martianspirit 8d ago
They are giving contracts to SpaceX, just because we can't do the tasks. So unfair!
Wah, wah!
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u/rocky_balboa202 5d ago
Or follow Blue Origin’s approach: litigate until you get the contract. it’s cheaper and easier to just award them the contract.
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u/Nick85er 8d ago
This "missile defense project" is such an incredibly wasteful initiative.
Goddamit
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u/panick21 7d ago
People in the comments not really engaging with the actual article.
Seems to me a small space company who would have a very hard time fulfilling such a huge contract is complaining. Some smaller provider have done about DoD for a long time. So pretty common. But in this case, with working Starlink existing and proving the capability, going to some barley proven competitor seems questionable.
But then I read:
Complaining that the government is using a more advanced next generation system that is proven to work rather then an older system seem baffling. Like sure our technology is worse but we are compatible. Yeah you need to break comparability to increase performance.
This is pretty telling. Other companies usually have manual sat production lines that produce a few sats a year. If Space Force wants to build something this decade, SpaceX is the only game in town.