[danielvf]

From what my friends on the edge of the space industry tell me, the Blue Origin and ULA bids and protests on this pad are nothing more than a series of attempts to throw up roadblocks for SpaceX.

For background, the pad in question is one of two Apollo/Shuttle pads. These two pads were designed for bigger rockets than any currently flying in the world. NASA is keeping the other pad not up for bid for it's far future SLS system.

ULA is Lockheed/Boeing. ULA currently does all US military launches (outside of the small stuff Orbital Sciences puts up). Neither ULA nor Blue Origin have current or publicly known future vehicles that would need this huge pad.

The theory is that by going to congress to force NASA to make this a shared pad, SpaceX's competitors hope to make the pad all but unusable by SpaceX. If the pad must be shared, all improvements must be run by all of the other's that are "sharing" the pad. Launch times and schedules must also be run by competitors. In addition, everything installed by SpaceX would need to be potentially uninstalled, if a competitor requested the pad for some reason.