Elon Musk
Jim Watson | AFP | Getty Images
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter on Thursday to blast his company’s biggest U.S. rocket-building competitor United Launch Alliance.
“Because their rockets are not reusable, it will become obvious over time that ULA is a complete waste of taxpayer money,” Musk said.
ULA did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Musk’s comment is the first made by any of SpaceX’s leadership after the U.S. Air Force announced on Friday that his space company would launch 40% of the military’s national security missions between 2022 and 2026. ULA won the other 60% of the missions, with the pair of companies beating out challengers Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman. In all, the contracts are very lucrative for both SpaceX and ULA, as the Pentagon expects to spend about $1 billion per year on launches over that timeframe.
ULA is a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Both SpaceX and ULA have launched dozens of payloads for the military, with the former increasingly challenging the latter in a market that was a ULA monopoly until 2014.
The valuable nature of national security contracts made the recent bidding between the four companies highly competitive. SpaceX sued the Air Force last year after not winning a development award and Blue Origin protested the criteria the Pentagon used for the launch contracts.
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