The Financial Post reports in its Friday edition that multiple billionaires are sure to be watching when the Vulcan rocket lifts off for the first time, as soon as next week.
A Bloomberg dispatch to the Post says that built through a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the new vehicle is poised to take on Elon Musk's SpaceX and ferry satellites and cargo for the likes of the Pentagon, NASA and even Amazon.
Vulcan is also helping fuel takeover offers for the company building it, the United Launch Alliance. Among them is a multibillion-dollar bid from Blue Origin LLC, the ambitious space venture run by Amazon's Jeff Bezos.
It is a pivotal moment for ULA, a once-dominant launch provider for the United States government whose star has faded in recent years. With SpaceX now leading the commercial market and making inroads with the government on the strength of its reusable Falcon 9 rocket, ULA finds itself needing to adapt to avoid being left behind.
"SpaceX likes to say they have a monopoly" in the launch market, Tory Bruno, ULA'S chief executive officer, said in October. "They don't."
Vulcan, set to debut early Jan. 8 after almost a decade in development, enters a market starved for more capacity.
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