Anna Forrester
United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno has outlined the Boeing–Lockheed Martin joint venture’s plans for the military space launch market over the next 20 years in an interview published Monday on Defense News.
Aaron Mehta reports that Bruno pointed to new initiatives that work to address potential challenges from market entrants such as SpaceX and government measures to ban the Russia-made RD-180 rocket engine.
Bruno noted future changes to the launch system and infrastructure, including the new reusable BE-4 engine and Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage, as well as the Vulcan rocket mentioned in a separate report.
“We are going to be continually improving and evolving that new launch system,” he told Defense News.
He also indicated plans to reduce the launch pads from five to two and create flexibility in terms of pad functions to accommodate various payloads and a quicker launch pace.
“We’ll be introducing something we call our commercial pricing model or our commercial business model,” Bruno added.
“[This] business model … has an eye to empowering the government and facilitating them moving to a different model, where they can still feel they are not really taking on more risk but they are able to procure faster and therefore less expensively.”
He said the model will have a fixed-price basic launch service offering and a fixed-price offering for custom services.
