[demachina]

The SpaceX design should be dramatically suprior to the aging Atlas and Delta designs because they are designed to be cheaper to build in the first place and they will be game changing if they manage to land the first stage and immediately turn it around for multiple launches.

Atlas and Delta are certainly good platforms for high reliability but they are expensive and they aren't making much effort to bring the costs down. Bringing the costs down would require design revisions that might undo that 50 years of design stability.

If SpaceX or someone else comes up with a reliable design at a dramatically lower price point ULA wont be able to sell their launchers unless its to a money is no object customer like the U.S. military.

Recovery and rapid turnaround of the first stage could make space access cheap enough many things would become possible and affordable that are not currently, due to high launch costs, like expeditions to Mars or large space structures.

[GreenPlastic]

ULA is already dead in the water. The only reason why they're around is because of the monopoly they have with US military launches.

[MPSimmons]

With the sheer amount of money backing ULA, there's no way they can be considered dead in the water. Their launch vessels are incredibly reliable, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

They're not just viable competitors, they're the current market leader. SpaceX is the peppy young upstart here (and still, failures like this are stepping stones to future reliability, if they're spending the time learning from their mistakes like they should be).

At least it was unmanned.

[greglindahl]

ULA wins very little commercial business. So yes, they're the market leader for US government launches of extremely expensive satellites. The rest of the market, commercial and US government launches of less expensive stuff, is where SpaceX is way ahead of ULA.

[hackuser]

Looking at SpaceX's and Orbital Science's recent performances, ULA seems to be in good shape.