The aerospace industry is known for its long business cycles, which make everything move very slowly. The good thing about it is that you can go off on a yearlong sabbatical and be sure that not much will have changed when you come back. The bad thing is that it makes it really hard to assess the quality of strategic investment decisions. Take the Airbus A380 as an example. Even though the program was launched more than 10 years ago, it is still not clear whether it was a bad or good decision, and we may have to wait a decade or more to call it a winner or a loser.
Fortunately, we don’t have to wait that long to figure out how the space launch sector is going to play out. Sure enough, the sector is still in the midst of a major shake-up, which makes it difficult to sort out the signal from the noise. Indeed, it seems that not a week goes by without some major announcement or event with the potential to reshuffle the cards. The most recent of those have been the $2 billion bid by Aerojet Rocketdyne to acquire United Launch Alliance (ULA) and the announcement by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin of its plan to build and launch space rockets from Florida. Is this just background noise, or do these events indicate a deeper shift in the balance of power between the old and new worlds of space?
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