Elon Musk says he lost a multi-billion-dollar contract when SpaceX didn’t hire a public official - Quartz: He’d like to expand his franchise to the defense department, but his company has faced a more challenging time displacing the incumbents there: In a no-bid process, United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, received a bulk contract worth billions of dollars for 36 rocket launches earlier this year, despite plans to introduce more competition and other cost-saving measures.
Musk’s tweets yesterday focused on what happened next: The man who awarded ULA the contract, defense official Roger “Scott” Correll, was hired soon after his retirement to handle government relations at Aerojet Rocketdyne, a company that builds rocket engines for ULA.