SpaceX president says rival not ready for competition

SpaceX, Elon Musk's fast-growing US space launch provider, has dismissed plans by its main rival to revamp to handle growing competition, saying United Launch Alliance remains far from being a "real commercial provider".

Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, was speaking after ULA on Monday revealed plans for a overhauled launch system known as Vulcan.

ULA, a Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture that handles all US national security rocket launches, said the new system would enable it to cut launch costs. It also said it would achieve the ground-breaking capability to use successive launches of parts of a vast spacecraft then assemble the parts in orbit.

However, Ms Shotwell dismissed her rival's claims.

"I don't know why they think they have an edge," she said of the capabilities the new craft would provide. "I think we're already better."

Ms Shotwell was speaking to the Financial Times on the sidelines of the annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. Tory Bruno, ULA's chief executive, had earlier expressed concern at the symposium about the financial effects of a looming decline in US military satellite launches.

SpaceX expects later this year to become the only ULA competitor certified to launch US military satellites, with the two poised to compete for all national security launches starting in 2019.

However, Ms Shotwell said SpaceX could accommodate a dip in government business because it had "lots of room" in other sectors it served, while ULA depended almost entirely on government revenue.

Mr Bruno said this week that the Vulcan's average launch cost should be below $100m and that it would compete for commercial business. SpaceX offers some launches of its Falcon 9 rocket for as little as $60m.

"They have lots of strategising to do on how they're going to turn themselves into a real commercial provider," Ms Shotwell said of ULA.

SpaceX on Tuesday successfully launched its latest mission to the International Space Station for Nasa, the US space agency. However, it failed in an effort to recover one of the rocket's boosters, which crashed onto an autonomous barge.

ULA's supporters argue that its excellent reliability justifies its higher costs. The company has undertaken 95 launches since being formed in 2006 and suffered only one partial failure, when two satellites were put into an excessively low orbit.

However, Ms Shotwell insisted that SpaceX's record - 17 successful launches, after Tuesday's flight - was better than ULA's. SpaceX lost a customer's satellite in 2012 but completed that flight's main mission, to deliver cargo to the International Space Station.

"We have focused on reliability from the beginning," Ms Shotwell said. "We think we have a very reliable vehicle architecture."

Ms Shotwell said SpaceX's record and technology would enable it to become the most powerful operator in fields far beyond serving the US military.

"We will become the dominant provider of space launch," she said.

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