A Falcon Heavy rocket launches the U.S.-67 mission on January 15, 2023 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
SpaceX
The U.S. military is raising the stakes — and widening the sector — on a high-profile competition for Space Force mission contracts.
The Space Force plans to purchase much more rocket launches from corporations in the approaching years than previously expected, granting more corporations a likelihood at securing billions in potential contracts.
“This can be a huge deal,” Col. Doug Pentecost, the deputy program executive officer of the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command, told reporters during a briefing this week.
Earlier this yr the Space Force kicked off the method to purchase five years’ value of launches, under a lucrative program generally known as National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3. Now it’s boosting the size.
The U.S. sees a rising impetus to enhance its military capabilities in space, spurring the necessity to almost triple the variety of launches in Phase 3 that it bought in Phase 2 in 2020.
“That just blows my mind,” Pentecost said. “We had only estimated 36 missions in Phase 2. For Phase 3, we’re estimating 90 missions.”
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In February, Space Force outlined a “mutual fund” technique to buying launches from corporations. It split NSSL Phase 3 into two groups. Lane 1 is the brand new approach, with lower requirements and a more flexible bidding process that permits corporations to compete as rockets debut over the approaching years. Lane 2 represents the prevailing approach, with the Space Force planning to pick out a set variety of corporations for missions that meet essentially the most demanding requirements.
Pentecost said Space Force hosted an industry day in February to go over this system’s details and had 22 corporations show up. Since then, Space Force made quite a few adjustments to Phase 3. It has added more missions, introduced a price cap, expanded Lane 2, and has set an annual schedule for mission assignments.
The federal government weighs bids by an organization’s “Total Evaluated Price” per launch. That is split into “Launch Service,” meaning how much it costs to construct and launch a rocket, and the “Launch Service Support,” which covers special requirements the military could have for launch. The Launch Service Support amount is capped at $100 million per yr per company.
“We implemented some cost-constraining tools in order that we do not balloon. We don’t desire [a situation where] everybody gets a mission — you get a mission, you get a mission, you get a mission — because then there is not any real competition,” Pentecost said.
“We do think that each one of our industry partners wish to be the primary guy, so we predict that may provide competitive pricing to maintain our costs down,” Pentecost added.
Widening Lane 2
While Lane 1 is predicted to attract the most important variety of bids and award 30 missions, Lane 2 is the large show.
With Lane 2, Space Force gives out the most dear contracts to launch national security satellites with the best stakes.
“These are those which might be a $1 billion [satellite] payload going to unique orbits,” Pentecost said.
Not only has Lane 2 seen a rise in what number of missions are up for grabs — currently estimated at 58 launches, up from 39 in February — but Space Force also made the choice to expand the available slots for eventual awards to a few corporations, as an alternative of limiting it to 2.
Space Force will assign 60% and 40% of 51 missions to the highest two bidders, respectively, and the remaining seven launches will go to the third-place bidder.
No matter where an organization ranks, it must show that it could meet all of the Lane 2 requirements, which include having launch sites on each the east coast and west coast, and the power to hit nine “reference” orbits with high accuracy several of that are much farther from Earth than the low Earth orbit requirement of Lane 1.
Asked by CNBC what number of corporations are developing rockets that may meet those requirements by the deadline for launches, a Space Force spokesperson declined to specify, saying the military is “tracking several” which might be “expanding their launch capabilities into most of those orbits.”
“We’re hoping that it is not just ULA, SpaceX and Blue Origin competing for that, as there are others who’ve messaged interest up to now,” Col. Chad Melone, the chief of Space Systems Command’s Launch Procurement and Integration division, said throughout the briefing.
Securing supply
Space Force is introducing an annual Oct. 1 deadline for assigning missions to corporations which have won a contract.
Pentecost explained the primary assignments are up for grabs in October 2025, but noted contracts don’t guarantee assignments, which protects Space Force from delays corporations could have in developing and flying rockets.
“You may even have won the contract, that you’ve this great plan on how you are going to be flying by [fiscal year] 2027. But since you are not flying yet, and I actually have a satellite that should fly in two years, we won’t offer you that mission — we are going to move it to the opposite guy,” Pentecost said.
Space Force goals to finalize its request for bidders by September after which have all of the proposals in by December, to then award the contracts in October 2024.
Space Force officials said an enormous driver of that push is to “guarantee capability,” as there are “a ton of other corporations” attempting to buy launches for satellites and Space Force must lock down its orders.
“We desired to ensure that we essentially hedged against the launch scarcity that might occur because, if there is a very large demand for launch and everyone seems to be [buying], prices may very well be very high,” Melone said.
But despite that fear, Pentecost said 2026 “appears to be the sweet spot” when quite a few corporations’ rockets will likely be done with development and able to fly. And firms that stay on course may have the upper hand in NSSL Phase 3.
“Should you’re flying before that, or in case your schedule is showing that you will be flying before that, you’ll get significant strengths, which can put you in a greater position to win one of the best provider or second best on this competition,” Pentecost said.