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How George W. Bush and NASA Saved SpaceX From Financial Ruin (blastingnews.com)
MarkWhittington quotes a report from Blasting News: Elon Musk and the people at SpaceX are rightly basking in the afterglow of finally landing the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket on a drone barge in the Atlantic. The same flight delivered an expandable module built by Bigelow Aerospace to the International Space Station. But, as Ars Technica points out, the launch, landing, and arrival at the space station would not have taken place had it not been for the generosity of NASA. George W. Bush began the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, which commercialized first cargo and then crew flights to and from the ISS. Four years later, SpaceX, having endured a number of launch failures of its small Falcon 1 rocket, was running out of cash. They were teetering on the brink of financial ruin as they were trying to develop a much larger and more complex Falcon 9 that would compete with more established launch vehicles such as the Atlas 5 and the Delta 4. Then NASA announced the initial contracts for COTS cargo flights. SpaceXâ(TM)s share was $1.6 billion. The NASA contract saved the company and allowed it to press on with building the Falcon 9 and the Dragon and then successfully compete for the Commercial Crew contracts.
After the Space Shuttle retired, and with all replacement programs canned by Congress, NASA had no way to get astronauts into space, except by hitching a ride with the Russians, and NASA had no native way to resupply the ISS.
The COTS program has already fixed one of those. NASA now has access to two locally-made spacecraft that can fly on either the entirely-American Falcon 9, or the partially-foreign Antares or Atlas V. This gives pretty robust resiliency - a single accident cannot halt the entire system. (Two back-to-back RUDs can do that, though, as we saw).
The CCD program is getting NASA access to two spacecraft capable of shuttling astronauts to low orbit - one built to fly atop basically any lift rocket that can handle the load. Three other spacecraft are in the program, theoretically able to replace either of the two main CCD craft should they fall too far behind schedule or too far over budget - helping to ensure robust access to space.
Where would NASA be right now without them? Well, they could still loft satellites or probes on the high-price ULA vehicles, but they'd probably have to abandon the ISS. Between only having Russia for crew transfers, and only having Russia, Japan and the ESA for resupply missions, they would not have been able to effectively operate the ISS.
The entire cost of COTS, CRS and CCD combined is $12.3B. For comparison, the Constellation program cost $9B, and produced no flyable launch vehicles or spacecraft before it was canceled. SLS will have cost us $18B by the time it makes its first test flight. Considering the commercial programs* have given us multiple, redundant systems, and included the cost of dozens of missions, while SLS is a single spacecraft for a single rocket that will perform a single flight on its $18B budget, I think we're getting a pretty good deal.
* SLS is technically "commercial" as it is being made by several independent corporations. However, the key difference is that it is not competitive. If Aerojet Rocketdyne cannot produce engines at sufficient quality and quantity, or at a low enough price, NASA has no alternative. Same for the boosters and Orbital ATK, or the upper stage and Boeing, etc.. (The other difference is that the COTS/CRS/CCD program rockets are assembled by the contractor, while SLS will be assembled by NASA, but this is not a particularly meaningful distinction)
I'm a musk fan like most here, and certainly no one sane will doubt that without NASA SpaceX wouldn't exist, but I wonder if SpaceX just went public if they could have avoided "financial ruin".
No. You have an overly idealistic idea of the benefits of going public.
At the time Space-X won the NASA contract, they had blown up three launches in a row, and succeeded in launching exacly once. In the space industry, pretty much nobody would launch a satellite on a booster with that bad a record. (Not quite nobody: Uzbekistan took the risk. Yeah: that was it. Uzbekistan.)
You can't go public with a company that has only one product, and that a product that almost nobody will buy. They were out of money; they couldn't keep launching to get a better launch record because they didn't have the cash. Yes, in this case, NASA really did their bacon.
SpaceX does not "already" have one. They definitely didn't when SLS started.
SLS is big. Really big. 70Mg to orbit with just the base model, potentially up to 150Mg with upgrades. It will be classified as a "Super-Heavy-Lift Launch Vehicle", the same class as Saturn V.
Falcon 9, as currently flown, can orbit 13Mg ("Medium Lift"). The biggest rocket currently flying, Delta IV Heavy, can orbit nearly 29Mg, making it one of two flying Heavy Lift Launch Vehicles. The analogous Falcon Heavy vehicle is specified to orbit 53Mg, putting it on the edge between HLLV and SHLLV.
That said, SLS is an absolute disaster of a project. It reuses almost every part of the Shuttle's powertrain - same engines, same fuel tanks, boosters that are identical except for being 25% longer. It uses an upper-stage engine that's flown since before Saturn. Years of study were spent on related designs, like Ares. And yet it will cost $18,000,000,000 and eight years to design, build and launch one of them? In eight years, SpaceX went from not existing, to building their own rocket using their own engine to launch their own spacecraft. And it's looking likely that, eight years from now, they'll have not one but two of their own super-heavy-lift rockets, Falcon Heavy and the Mars Colonial Transporter launcher.
Quite to the contrary. I've been on the government side of tha table v.s. Northrop and it was the contractor saying "that's stupid and will run up costs." While the government was insisting on change because everyone competent on our side quit and got a real job.
P.s. No, I wasn't competent. I was a pilot pretending to be a program manager to bring "the operators perspective" even though nobody in the program office gave a shit about the product or anything other than making sure that they couldn't be blamed for any decision the government made.
The difference is that NASA is requiring SLS to build a man rated design, where the Air Force pencil whipped SpaceX's certification after the fact with inadequate engineering data to support it.
Nobody has "pencil whipped" anything. Neither Falcon 9 nor Dragon are man-rated yet. They're more than a year away from man-rating, with their typical optimistic schedule. More likely it will be a year and a half to two years yet.
Russia was an autocratic totalitarianism under the Czar and the Soviet Union remained an autocratic totalitarianism under the Central Committee's General Secretary. The only thing the Bolsheviks actually used from the writings of Marx was the name Communism. By Grouping Communism and Socialism together is very obvious that you haven't studied either. Your post is nothing more than worthless ideological rant.