With new contracts, SpaceX will become the US military’s top launch provider

The US Space Force announced Friday it selected SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and Blue Origin for $13.7 billion in contracts to deliver the Pentagon’s most critical military satellites to orbit into the early 2030s.
These missions will launch the government’s heaviest national security satellites, like the National Reconnaissance Office’s large, bus-sized spy platforms, and deploy them into bespoke orbits. These types of launches often demand heavy-lift rockets with long-duration upper stages that can cruise through space for six or more hours.
The contracts awarded Friday are part of the next phase of the military’s space launch program once dominated by United Launch Alliance, the 50-50 joint venture between legacy defense contractors Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
After racking up a series of successful launches with its Falcon 9 rocket more than a decade ago, SpaceX sued the Air Force for the right to compete with ULA for the military’s most lucrative launch contracts. The Air Force relented in 2015 and allowed SpaceX to bid. Since then, SpaceX has won more than 40 percent of missions the Pentagon has ordered through the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program, creating a relatively stable duopoly for the military’s launch needs.
The Space Force took over the responsibility for launch procurement from the Air Force after its creation in 2019. The next year, the Space Force signed another set of contracts with ULA and SpaceX for missions the military would order from 2020 through 2024. ULA’s new Vulcan rocket initially won 60 percent of these missions—known as NSSL Phase 2—but the Space Force reallocated a handful of launches to SpaceX after ULA encountered delays with Vulcan.
ULA’s Vulcan and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets will launch the remaining 42 Phase 2 missions over the next several years, then move on to Phase 3, which the Space Force announced Friday.
Spreading the wealth
This next round of Space Force launch contracts will flip the script, with SpaceX taking the lion’s share of the missions. The breakdown of the military’s new firm, fixed-price launch agreements goes like this: