SpaceX OK'd for military contracts

The Falcon 9 rocket of billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX won U.S. Air Force certification, letting the company battle a Boeing Co.-Lockheed Martin Corp. venture for national security space missions.

Competition between the two launch providers could heat up as soon as June, when the Air Force said it will issue a request for proposals for GPS III launch services.

"SpaceX's emergence as a viable commercial launch provider provides the opportunity to compete launch services for the first time in almost a decade," Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said in a statement Tuesday. "Ultimately, leverage of the commercial space market drives down cost to the American taxpayer and improves our military's resiliency."

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. has fought for a role in military launches, which include satellites that let troops communicate on battlefields. The segment, estimated at $70 billion through 2030 by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, is the largest in a market that also includes civilian and commercial contracts, such as work SpaceX does for NASA.

"This is an important step toward bringing competition to national security space launch," Musk, chief executive officer of Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX, said in a statement. "We thank the Air Force for its confidence in us and look forward to serving it well."

Certifying SpaceX to ferry sensitive military and national-security payloads took two years and involved 150 people, at a cost of more than $60 million.

In January, SpaceX agreed to drop its lawsuit against the Air Force's "block buy" contract awarded to the Boeing-Lockheed venture, United Launch Alliance. The Air Force said then that it would "work collaboratively with SpaceX to complete the certification process in an efficient and expedient manner."

SpaceX plans to aggressively compete with Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed and Chicago-based Boeing, the biggest U.S. contractors. SpaceX has argued that the program, known by the military as the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle, has cost taxpayers millions of dollars a year because United Launch has had a lock on the contracts.

SpaceX already has a $1.6 billion contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to resupply the International Space Station and a second contract, valued at as much as $2.6 billion, to transport crews. The closely held company has opened a Seattle engineering office to develop its own satellites.

Business on 05/27/2015

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