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SpaceX Is Suing the Air Force for the Right to Launch Military Satellites

Musk says his rockets are better and four times cheaper than Lockheed Martin's and Boeing's.
Elon Musk made the announcement Friday. Image: Screengrab from the press conference

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced Friday that the company is suing the United States Air Force for the right to compete for military space launch contracts.

Musk said that “billions of dollars of taxpayer money” are being wasted due to the military’s contract with the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Earlier this year, the United States Air Force signed a procurement deal with the companies without allowing other companies to compete. Musk said that the company asked to be considered but was turned down, adding that his Falcon 9 rocket is four times cheaper and just as reliable as ULA’s rockets at launching military satellites into orbit.

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“We feel this is not right,” Musk said at a press conference in Washington, DC. “It seems odd that if our vehicle is good enough for NASA and supporting a $100 billion space station and it’s good enough for NASA science satellites, it should be good enough for the military.”

Musk said the suit would be filed in the Court of Federal Claims. The entrepreneur said that his company wasn’t given any justification for not being allowed to compete for that contract and that the company did everything the USAF asked it to do in order to be considered. He said that ULA’s rockets use Russian engines, which is a particularly bad idea given its involvement in Ukraine.

“ULA rockets are four times more expensive than ours … I don’t know why they’re so expensive. They’re insanely expensive,” he said. To sort of add salt to the wound, the primary engine used is Russian … it seems strange that we’re sending hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money to Russia when it’s in the process of invading Ukraine.”

Musk said that his Falcon 9 rocket is newer and better than ULA’s Atlas V and Delta IV, which were both developed in the 1990s.

The company is likely to have some support from lawmakers; earlier this month, a Congressional committee repeatedly expressed concerns that Americans were spending money on Russian engines.

SpaceX has become a serious player in the space launch business over the last couple years—it became the first commercial company to resupply the International Space Station and, last week, tested a reusable version of its Falcon 9 rocket. Musk said that that first test was mostly a success—the rocket put its landing legs down and landed vertically in the Atlantic Ocean, but was destroyed by strong waves.

The goal, eventually, is to land back at the launch pad “with the accuracy of a helicopter.” Musk says that in doing so, the company can reduce the price of getting to space by as much as 70 percent and could even fly twice in one day.