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September 15, 2009

Simberg on ULA's moon plans

Rand posted a polished piece on the topic of ULA papers at AIAA 2009 meeting. Check this out:

While Boeing and Lockheed Martin can smell the Ares blood in the water, they still both have lucrative contracts for the Constellation program (Orion for Lockheed Martin, and the Ares I upper stage for Boeing), and they can't afford to upset the apple cart unless they know that the program is definitely dead. Three years ago, Lockheed Martin got itself into hot water with the former administrator, Mike Griffin, at the AIAA meeting in San Jose, where they held a joint press conference with Bigelow Aerospace announcing a study to "human rate" the Atlas V to service Bigelow's planned facilities. Griffin reportedly called upper management there to complain about the potential threat these plans posed to maintaining political support for Ares.

Well, yeah... But I'm quite certain that when ULA was created, nobody foreseen the beneficial effects that would arise. Rand himself notes that the split+merge maneuver was a "shotgun wedding" forced by the military for their own benefit.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at 10:31 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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