United Launch Alliance (ULA), later this year, will release further details on a pair of initiatives for making launch purchases “Amazon-simple” while reducing lead times from years to months, company CEO Tory Bruno said April 21.
Bruno said the first initiative, called “Fast Buy,” will simplify the purchasing experience by offering pre-determined rocket configurations at fixed prices. The configurations will also have pre-bundled, fixed-priced options for “bells and whistles,” he said.
The current launch service procurement process is slow and complicated, Bruno said, because it’s a much customized experience: contracts are complex and engineers make trades to figure out exactly what the rocket’s configuration will be. Bruno said he estimates that model contracts should take about 90 percent of the work out of getting to contract.
The initiative for reducing launch lead times will be even more impactful, Bruno said. ULA’s “Ready Launch” initiative, he said, will take the average of two or three years lead time and reduce it to “some number of months.” This, he said, will give customers options in case of a launch failure or a satellite manufacturing slip. Bruno said the current method of procuring launches is rigid, requiring customers to commit sums of money years in advance for launch services before a satellite’s construction is finalized.
Bruno argued the current lead times and contracting methods for launch services are a difficult business model for satellite operators and an impediment to space endeavors. He specifically said the current business model reduces the availability of space-based telecommunications and earth observations due to tied-up cash and the difficulty of closing business cases.
“I think those two (initiatives) alone are going to fundamentally change the way people use space and the way operators view the launch industry,” Bruno told an audience at a Washington Space Business Roundtable (WSBR) lunch in Washington.
Bruno said the eventual result of reducing the complexity and long lead times for access to space will introduce a concept called elasticity to the space market. Elasticity is the measure of the responsiveness of a demand and supply of a good or service to an increase, or decrease in its price. Bruno said if the cost of space access is reduced, new missions will appear to take advantage.
Bruno said he doesn’t know what might happen due to elasticity, but he imagined new missions like commercial human habitats, commercially-based research or space-based manufacturing could occur. He said maybe industry will tap the roughly 1,500 objects between Earth and the Moon for “unimaginable” quantities of wealth and resources.
The initiative are part of ULA’s overall effort to adapt to competition in the launch market as Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) will soon be certified to compete for Defense Department launches, which ULA has held a monopoly on for almost a decade. ULA is also working on a new propulsion system called Vulcan that will feature a new engine from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.
ULA is a joint venture of Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Boeing [BA].