Opening launcher opportunities

摘要

New legislative changes threaten to topple a dominant position on the procurement of launch services for NASA, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and the US Air Force, held until now by United Launch Alliance. A partnership between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, ULA offers Delta IV and Atlas V in a range of variants but competitors such as SpaceX claim procurement costs can be cut by up to one-third. These three agencies have identified four levels of risk tolerance and the critical acceptance of potentially losing a payload so as to balance that threat against the assessed reliability of the launcher.