HMM: When It Comes To Military Launches, SpaceX May No Longer Be The Low-Cost Provider.

Along the way to its breakthrough win with the Space Force on August 7, something curious happened in the way SpaceX priced its services. The price for using its Falcon Heavy vehicle more than doubled from what Musk originally claimed would be the maximum cost.

In 2018 he said the rocket would cost no more than $150 million to loft heavy payloads into orbit. But the award SpaceX received for a single mission in the first year of Phase Two was $316 million. That’s quite an increase.

In fact, it’s such a hefty price-tag that SpaceX is getting almost as much money for a single Falcon Heavy mission as the $337 million ULA is getting for two missions. We don’t know details about the missions because they’re all secret, but industry insiders say that all three payloads are sizable, and headed for geosynchronous orbit.

It isn’t clear how this remarkable disparity in pricing came about. ULA bid a new launch vehicle called Vulcan Centaur that is said to be more efficient than its legacy Atlas and Delta rockets. SpaceX bid the same Falcon Heavy vehicle that in 2018 was priced at $130 million to loft another classified mission into orbit.

So how did the price-tag on a Falcon Heavy mission get from $130 million to $316 million? Darned if I know. I asked SpaceX for an explanation, but so far I haven’t heard back.

Very strange, all the way around.