Any win for ULA is a loss for taxpayers... Their entire business model is "take what you can get from a stupid/credulous customer (the federal government and it's pork barreling politicians)".
When the ULA Vulcan was first announced, the plan was the engines, which are 90% of the cost of the first stage, would be recoverable and reusable. The idea was the engine section would detach from the rest of the rocket, fall a ways and then a parachute would open, and finally it would be caught mid-air by a helicopter. The idea was this would help it compete on price with the Falcon 9.<p>However, according to the Wikipedia article on Vulcan, this has not been funded, and so the rocket is going to be fully disposable.
It's interesting to see how NASA has been slowly being privatized via these contracts. People used to be rooting for NASA and now they are rooting for a company that at the end of the day, will do as they please with the technology developed. Americans seem to prefer small government and 'offshore' everything to for-profit companies. In the future, what stops an American company from one day abandoning the USA to another country and leaving the USA without the infrastructure to do space travel anymore? (not familiar if there's regulation in place to stop this?) Or maybe this would just cause the price to rise in the USA for the same services.
Hurray, more government money being laundered to pay master Elon and his gang.<p>Let's keep increasing taxes and keep printing more fiat money and give it to Elon Musk so that we can all be good slaves, giving him and his gang tangible goods and services in exchange for what is left of the magic green paper which the government gave to him for free; much of which he burned off into the void of space. Long live master Elon.