Why NASA Rejected Lockheed Martin's Jupiter For Commercial Resupply Services 2 (fool.com)

MarkWhittington writes: Recently, NASA rejected Lockheed Martin's bid for a contract for the Commercial Resupply Services 2 (CRS-2) program as being too expensive. CRS-2 is the follow-on to the current CRS program that has SpaceX and Orbital Systems sending supplies to the International Space Station. Motley Fool explained why the aerospace giant was left behind and denied a share of what might be $14 billion between 2018 and 2024. In essence, Lockheed Martin tried to get the space agency to pay for a spacecraft that would do far more than just take cargo to and from the International Space Station.

Comments

Horrible Article

[gman003]

So half of it sounds like Lockheed Martin whining that they lost the contract, even though as the biggest aerospace company they should have won. The writer either changed his mind halfway through and decided they deserved the loss, or just copied the first half verbatim from Lockheed Martin's press release.

The other half is based on ignoring the word "development". Sure, the marginal cost to send a pound of stuff to space is about $10K. The cost to design a system to do so is considerably greater, particularly when you're developing not one, but three systems, for redundancy.

And then he caps it off with "maybe we should just build a space elevator?", like the only reason we haven't done so is because it would cost too much, and certainly not because of the immense engineering challenges.

This article is just a poor, unsubtle advert

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a crappy article. It says that Lockheed Martin should have "by all rights" won the contract, even though it then admits that their bid was the highest and was just a way to get NASA to fund their own private goal to build a space tug, which NASA doesn't want and can't afford. And then to bring up a space elevator as though it's a reasonable, inexpensive alternative? What in the hell?

Of course, it caps off with this, and it's then obvious that they just spent a couple minutes summarizing articles from other sites so they could add in their own advertising to it:

The next billion-dollar iSecret
The world's biggest tech company forgot to show you something at its recent event, but a few Wall Street analysts and the Fool didn't miss a beat: There's a small company that's powering their brand-new gadgets and the coming revolution in technology. And we think its stock price has nearly unlimited room to run for early-in-the-know investors! To be one of them, just click here.

Wow, it's just like a good 30% of the spam I regularly get.