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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.
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.
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.