The recent announcement that the Pentagon will set aside up to 14 Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV)-class rocket "core" purchases for open competition beginning in 2015 is an important first step in the long-overdue process of both incentivizing cost reductions in the EELV program and in addressing the gaping flaw in logic in first accepting, and then heavily subsidizing, a two-vendor solution in the Atlas 5 and Delta 4, which share a single point of failure in two variants of the same RL-10 upper-stage engine. Given the changes taking place in the U.S. government's approach to securing military launches, the recent proposal to have the taxpayer fund development of a dual launch adapter for deploying GPS satellites from the Atlas 5, which would not debut until 2017, should be viewed in a very skeptical light. There are multiple problems with the proposal, not the least of which is that the numbers don't add up.
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