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Blue Origin would use the Pentagon funding to complete development of its planned "New Glenn" heavy lift rocket, ULA would invest its money in "Vulcan Centaur," while Northrop Grumman would try to break into the market with its very first heavy lift vehicle -- "OmegA." Then all three would bid on a second set of "Launch Service Procurement" contracts to use these new rockets to launch U.S. government satellites into orbit.

Two years later, the other shoe dropped: Despite initially winning financial support from the Pentagon, neither Blue Origin nor Northrop Grumman would win any of this second batch of contracts. All $5.5 billion worth of launches over the next six years would go to ULA (which also received funds in the first round), and to SpaceX (which didn't).

Result: By the time 2028 rolls around, and it's time for the Pentagon to award another set of launch contracts, the only rockets that are still flying, and able to compete, may be ULA and SpaceX rockets. Northrop Grumman is out of the big rocket-building game, and despite plenty of positive press, even Blue Origin's success is not assured.

You don't need to tell us twice

Giving credit where credit is due, Northrop Grumman tried to prepare for this eventuality. Hoping to diversify its business to survive a possible Pentagon contract loss, in late 2019 Northrop signed a launch contract with Colorado-based Saturn Satellite Networks to launch a pair of commercial NationSat small GEO satellites into orbit on OmegA's inaugural launch.

Perhaps, if Northrop had succeeded in signing up additional commercial customers, it could have developed a big enough book of business to survive the loss of the Pentagon business. Commercial customers proved hard to come by, however, and so within weeks of learning it had lost the competition for Pentagon launch contracts, Northrop announced it would halt development of OmegA.

Last month, Space Force put the final nail in the coffin, confirming it has officially terminated funding through Northrop's (and Blue Origin's, too) development contract. Of the $792 million initially awarded to Northrop, the government says it had paid out only $532 million by the date of termination. Blue Origin received $256 million of its awarded $500 million, before it too was cut off.

What's next for Northrop Grumman and Blue Origin?
In the absence of both commercial contracts and federal funding, the OmegA program is now history. Going forward, Northrop's space business will comprise primarily (1) building solid rocket boosters for other companies' spaceships (ULA's Vulcan Centaur for example, and the NASA Space Launch System, for which Boeing is prime contractor); (2) launching smaller payloads aboard medium-lift Antares and small Minotaur rockets; and (3) building nukes for the military.

As for Blue Origin, it's keeping hope alive, pressing forward with the development of New Glenn on its own dime, and hoping to bid for upcoming NASA launch business. More successful than Northrop in the commercial market, Blue Origin has also secured launch contracts for customers including Eutelsat, Mu Space, OneWeb, Sky Perfect JSAT, and Telesat, giving it a diversified revenue stream that may keep it in business long enough to bid again once the Pentagon reopens bidding on new lucrative defense contractsseveral years from now.

That's assuming, of course, Blue Origin can get New Glenn built and tested. Its first launch is now scheduled to take place late in 2021.

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In a rare surprise for Starlink launches, a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster has failed to successfully land after kicking off the first of two Starlink missions planned in a 25-hour period.

Some nine minutes after liftoff, Falcon 9 booster B1059 suffered an unknown failure that cut short its sixth landing attempt a second or two after landing burn. With no sign of a sustained burn, the booster most likely impacted the ocean at supersonic or high-subsonic speeds, unfortunately ending a record streak of 24 consecutively successful Falcon landings.

Thankfully, Falcon 9 B1059 had already supported five orbital-class launches since its December 2019 debut and, as always, booster recovery is always a secondary objective for SpaceX launches. The primary objective, deploying another batch of 60 Starlink satellites, is on its way to completion as Falcon 9's upper stage orbits the Earth in preparation for a second small burn and payload deployment around 65 minutes after liftoff.

Update: Falcon 9's upper stage performed flawlessly, igniting for a brief one-second orbit-raising burn and ultimately deploying a batch of 60 Starlink satellites without issue.

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Barring delays caused by B1059's landing failure, Starlink-17 delayed roughly ten times by weather and technical bugs over the last month is scheduled to launch no earlier than 12:55 am EST (5:55 UTC) on Wednesday, February 17th, a few minutes less than 26 hours after Starlink-19. Stay tuned for SpaceX's official webcast!

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Elon Musk's private space enterprise raised new funds at a rather interesting price of $419.99 per share, just 1 cent away from $420, an amount that has become infamous in Tesla lore following the CEO's infamous "funding secured" fiasco in 2018. With the recent funding round, SpaceX's valuation has effectively jumped about 60% from its previous round in August, when the company raised almost $2 billion. The August funding round resulted in SpaceX having an estimated valuation of $46 billion.
SpaceX, for its part, has not issued a comment about its latest funding round as of writing.

Interestingly enough, insiders and existing investors were reportedly able to sell $750 million in a secondary transaction, as per a report from CNBC. SpaceX also reportedly raised only a portion of the funding available in the marketplace, with one of the insiders informing the news outlet that the private space firm received insane demand of about $6 billion in offers over three days.

The recent funding round has definitively strengthened SpaceX's war chest, and it also allows the company to pursue two of its most capital-intensive projects to date. One of these is the further buildout of Starlink, a satellite constellation aimed at providing high-speed, stable internet access to remote areas.

SpaceX has hinted in the past that Starlink will cost about $10 billion to build, though the company also noted that it expects the constellation to bring in as much as $30 billion per year. That's over ten times the annual revenue of SpaceX's rocket business.

So far, Starlink has launched over 1,000 satellites for the constellation, and recent filings to the Federal Communications Commission last week have revealed that the service's public beta now has over 10,000 users in the United States and abroad. Initial reception to Starlink has been widely positive so far, with users in remote areas noting that the satellite internet service is far quicker and more stable than their previous internet providers.

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