This is John Batcher, conversation with my good friend and colleague Bob Zimmerman about the new day, the military contracting of launch providers.

The old way was one provider for 10 years, big contract.

Now putting the bid out and seeing who shows up.

The first three are SpaceX, ULA and Blue Origin.

There will be more added.

Bob explains here why this is a better and faster and cheaper way to get things done.

And spreading the good news around all of the booster builders, many, many.

The competition with China, with Russia, with other space-faring nations has to take into account that the US has many

many choices. Is Bob Zimmerman to explain?

This system for picking launch providers and in the past they would pick the launch

providers they pick only one or two and they have them as a monopoly for maybe a half

a decade.

Well they're doing things differently now. They've picked SpaceX

ULA and Blue Origin as a launch provided for the next five years, but they say they're going to revisit

this on a yearly basis to add new companies as they become available and that's the right way to do

things because it means that they're not limiting competition they're just simply

picking the qualified Lord providers at the moment of course Blue Origin yet hasn't proven anything but it's

expected to launch for the first time before the end of this year and if it does

then it's a valid launch provider once it's got its certification for the military and so those are the three companies they picked.

These companies will now bid on 5.6 billion dollars worth of launches over the next five years

but next year are the companies that prove themselves could

enter the bidding competition. That's really good news.

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