When the Vulcan rocket lifts off for the first time as soon as next week, multiple billionaires are sure to be watching.
Built through a joint venture of Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., the new vehicle is poised to take on Elon Musk’s SpaceX and ferry satellites and cargo for the likes of the Pentagon, NASA and even Amazon.com Inc.
Vulcan is also helping fuel takeover offers for the company building it, the United Launch Alliance. Among them is a multibillion-dollar bid from Blue Origin LLC, the ambitious space venture run by billionaire Jeff Bezos, according to people familiar with the matter.
It’s a pivotal moment for ULA, a once-dominant launch provider for the U.S. government whose star has faded in recent years. With SpaceX now leading the commercial market and making inroads with the government on the strength of its reusable Falcon 9 rocket, ULA finds itself needing to adapt to avoid being left behind.
“SpaceX likes to say they have a monopoly” in the launch market, Tory Bruno, ULA’s chief executive officer, said in an October interview. “They don’t.”
Vulcan, set to debut early Monday after almost a decade in development, enters a market starved for more capacity. The rocket is meant to be a cheaper, all-American alternative to ULA’s legacy Atlas and Delta vehicles to carry the government’s highest profile satellites.
If Vulcan proves it can fly — and then fly again and again — the vehicle is the company’s best hope to gain ground on Musk’s launch behemoth. ULA, which also aims to build out the commercial side of its business, has already signed contracts worth billions for roughly 70 Vulcan missions.
“It’s important to demonstrate success as soon as they can,” said Cristina Chaplain, an independent space analyst and former director at the Government Accountability Office overseeing space and defense programs. “They really want to be able to stay in the game.”
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‘HATFIELDS AND MCCOYS’
ULA was formed by Boeing and Lockheed in 2006. The pioneering venture had “a virtual monopoly on U.S. government launches” in those early years, said George Sowers, the company’s former chief scientist. Those contracts were sweetened with extra money to ensure the Defense Dept. could maintain access to space at a time when there were few viable launch providers.
But the ownership structure — with two publicly traded companies that compete for defense contracts — also muddied its strategy. Sowers, who’s now a professor at the Colorado School of Mines, likened it to “being owned by the Hatfields and McCoys.”
“Trying to get them to agree on anything at the level of the board of directors was nearly impossible,” he said.
Unlike newer launch rivals that have tapped the public and private markets for capital in pursuit of ambitious new technologies, ULA doesn’t get cash infusions from investors, according to Bruno. That has forced the CEO to keep the company’s operations and staff lean.
“We are profitable every year,” Bruno said. “Always have been.”
Now, ULA must execute an increasingly busy flight schedule in the coming years with even fewer launch operations personnel after recent layoffs, a person familiar with the matter said. ULA’s headcount is hovering around 2,300 employees, the person said, compared with the more than 10,000 employees at both SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Last summer, ULA laid off some 75 people, roughly 40 percent of launch operations staff at its Vandenberg Space Force Base site in California and around 12 percent at Cape Canaveral in Florida, the person said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the matter is private.