NASA Awards New Commercial Crew Contracts

FleaPlus writes "Continuing last year's successful CCDev (Commercial Crew Development) program, NASA has selected four companies to receive 'CCDev2' seed funding for commercial crew systems. The companies will only receive money if they meet development and testing milestones in the next year, with $75M going to SpaceX for developing their sidemount escape system and testing their Dragon capsule, $92M to Boeing for developing their CST-100 capsule, $80M to Sierra Nevada Corp.'s DreamChaser top-mounted spaceplane, and $22M for Blue Origin's capsule and pusher escape system."

Comments

Here are the SAAs

[QuantumG]

http://procurement.ksc.nasa.gov/documents/NNK11MS03S_Boeing_SAA_Combined_Redacted.pdf
http://procurement.ksc.nasa.gov/documents/NNK11MS01S_SAA-%20SNC_Redacted.pdf
http://procurement.ksc.nasa.gov/documents/NNK11MS02S_SAA_BlueOrigin_04-18-2011.pdf
http://procurement.ksc.nasa.gov/documents/NNK11MS04S_SAA-SpaceX.pdf

The SpaceX milestones amount to this:

1. meeting
2. design review
3. another design review
4. another design review
5. testing of the crew cabin seats and controls (SpaceX is paying for this)
6. design review
7. more testing of the crew cabin seats and controls (SpaceX is paying for this)
8. confirmation that SpaceX has built the parts required for the Launch Abort System test
9. actually do the Launch Abort System test
10. yet another design review

So, out of 10 milestones, 4 of them involve actual work and 6 are posturing, paperwork and oversight. And to think, Space Act Agreements are the most efficient way NASA does business.

Re:Here are the SAAs

[ravenspear]

To say that design is not actual work is ludicrous.

I assume you are the type of coder that proceeds straight from requirements to hacking something together?