CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA — The US Air Force on Wednesday awarded billionaire Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) an $83 million contract to launch a GPS satellite, breaking the monopoly that Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co have held on military space launches for more than a decade.
"The Global Positioning System satellite will be launched in May, 2018 from Florida,'' Air Force officials said.
The fixed-price award is the military's first competitively sourced launch service contract in more than a decade. It ends the exclusive relationship between the military and United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
ULA did not compete for the GPS launch contract, citing accounting issues, implications of trade sanctions limiting imports of its rockets' Russian-made engines and, according to a former ULA vice president, SpaceX's cut-rate pricing.
"This GPS III Launch Services contract award achieves a balance between mission success, meeting operational needs, lowering launch costs, and reintroducing competition for National Security Space missions," Lieutenant General Samuel Greaves, who heads the Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center, said.
Between now and 2018, the Air Force plans to solicit bids for contracts covering eight more satellite launches.
The $82.7 million fixed-price contract awarded to SpaceX covers production of a Falcon 9 rocket, spacecraft integration, launch operations and spaceflight certification.
Musk, a billionaire entrepreneur who helped found Tesla Motors Inc and PayPal Holdings Inc, started SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of slashing launch costs to make Mars travel affordable.
SpaceX also said on Wednesday that it planned to send an unmanned Dragon spacecraft to Mars as early as 2018, a first step in achieving Musk's goal to fly people to another planet.
The company said it would provide details of its Mars programme at the International Astronautical Congress in September.
"Dragon 2 is designed to be able to land anywhere in the solar system," Musk posted on Twitter. "Red Dragon Mars mission is the first test flight."
He said that with an internal volume about the size of a sports utility vehicle, the Dragon spacecraft would be uncomfortable for people making the long journey to Mars.
SpaceX now flies cargo versions of its Dragon capsule to and from the International Space Station under a $2 billion resupply services contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa).
The company is also upgrading the capsules to carry astronauts, with test flights to the station scheduled for 2017, under a separate Nasa contract worth up to $2.6 billion.
Nasa does not plan to provide financial assistance to SpaceX's Mars mission. The agency is investing in its own heavy-lift rocket, capsule and launch pad modifications targeting Mars travel.
By the time Nasa expects to debut a test flight in lunar orbit with astronauts onboard in 2023, the agency will have spent about $24 billion on the programme, an April 2016 Government Accountability Office report shows.