The Scent of Horse Manure

The rancid smell of crap reeks off of this:

Commercial startup company SpaceX planned to launch its first low-cost Falcon 1 rocket this summer from Vandenberg. But the U.S. Air Force won't allow the new Falcon to fly until after the final Lockheed Martin Titan 4 rocket lifts off from the base carrying a large National Reconnaissance Office spacecraft cargo.

Military officials are worried about the possible threat, however minuscule, that the unproven Falcon booster could rain debris on the Titan pad in a liftoff mishap.

The clandestine Titan mission was supposed to launch July 10, with Falcon following behind in August. But the wait to launch recently grew longer when an undisclosed problem with the spy payload postponed its liftoff to September 9, and potentially even later.

I was unaware that this was the reason for the Falcon I being delayed. I smell foul play in all of this. SpaceX and the Falcon would have been a direct threat to Titan and Lockheed... I can't shake the possibility that some shady back room dealings were in the works to make things hard for SpaceX. The threat of debris was low enough - and quite frankly I would be more afraid of something going wrong with the Titan 4 than with the Falcon...

"The Air Force has said they are unwilling to take any risks with the last Titan 4 mission," Musk said. "There is some risk that if Falcon 1 were to go off track, there's some risk of damaging the Titan 4. I think it is a very tiny risk, but they are unwilling to take even a tiny risk."

Bearaucratic nonsense. It seems to me someone's constituency was threatened by SpaceX. They could have taken the risk. They weren't willing to take the risk because the government had already poured so much money into the Titan program they didn't want to take the risk and maybe they couldn't afford to let a small private company show that the government is wasting taxpayers money on big aerospace contractors who balloon the costs of going into space.

Those suspicions are unconfirmed however. Though my gut tells me that something's not right here.