Space Exploration Technology Corp., a start-up seeking to slash the cost of coursing through the cosmos, has been granted a five-year license to launch rockets from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the U.S. Air Force said Thursday.
The approval may help privately held SpaceX, as the company is known, compete with Orbital Sciences Corp., which develops small space systems, and later perhaps with the bigger rockets of the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp. and The Boeing Co., and Arianespace.
Gen. Kevin Chilton, commander of Air Force Space Command, said the license agreement with SpaceX — the brainchild of PayPal co-founder Elon Musk — was good news for the U.S. Air Force and for the nation.
"These types of agreements encourage entrepreneurial space achievement which can benefit both the (Department of Defense) and commercial space industries," Chilton said in a statement announcing the approval.
Marco Caceres, a space expert at the Teal Group aerospace consultancy in Fairfax, Va., said SpaceX initially would compete directly against Orbital Sciences' Minotaur rocket, which he said costs about $10 million to $12 million per launch.
The Cape Canaveral launch deal is "kind of like saying we believe in you and we want you to be part of our team," Caceres said in a telephone interview.
Another SpaceX competitor at the smaller end of the scale is the Dnepr rocket built by ISC Kosmotras of Russia. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, which has not yet flown, would compete with Boeing's Delta IV, Lockheed's Atlas V and Arianespace's Ariane 5, according to SpaceX's Web site.
The stated goal of El Segundo, California-based SpaceX, founded in 2002, is to improve the cost and reliability of access to space and become the world's leading launch provider "and then some."
SpaceX currently has launch facilities at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and Omelek Island in the Marshall Islands of the central Pacific.
