The U.S. Air Force said on Friday it awarded United Launch Alliance (ULA) and Elon Musk's SpaceX $653 million in combined military launch contracts under the Pentagon's next-generation, multibillion-dollar launch capability program.
FILE PHOTO: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken lifts off during NASA's SpaceX Demo-2 mission to the International Space Station from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., May 30, 2020. REUTERS/Joe Skipper - RC2DZG96N2DL/File Photo
The contracts are for launch service orders beginning in 2022 and allocate $337 million to ULA, a joint venture between Boeing Co and Lockheed Martin Corp, and $316 million to SpaceX for the first missions of roughly 34 total that the two rocket firms will support through 2027. The awards are part of the Pentagon’s 2014 mandate from Congress to curb its dependency on rockets using Russia’s RD-180 engine and transition to U.S.-made rockets for launching Washington’s most sensitive national security payloads to space.
“Today’s awards mark a new epoch of space launch that will finally transition the Department off Russian RD-180 engines,” Roper said in a statement.
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