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.

Comments

Having worked for NASA during 8 COTS years

[pecosdave]

We generally referred to COTS as "Commercial Off The Shelf".

In the shuttle and before days since it was the early days of computers and digital communications there was a LOT of custom hardware. Most of our networking was serial, and let me tell there was some weird custom equipment floating around. I got Mil-Spec certified in wire-wrap more than a decade after the spec was cancelled.

This was good equipment when it was created for what they wanted it for. Long story short when the shuttle launched a reel to reel flight recorder seemed like a good idea. By the time it quit flying you could do everything that flight recorder did with an iPod, it would be more reliable, hold more, you could put a triple redundant system in far less space and use less power doing it. Due to government red tape and "certification" programs this sort of thing didn't often happen.

When the shuttle was decommissioned the COTS initiative - as we knew it - really began to take off (my first five years there were still COTS, just lesser). It basically meant if you had a monitor go bad on one of our OS/2 systems (really) with a 15" IBM CRT monitor with a particular part number I could instead use any 15" CRT we happened to have laying around in spares, and if I didn't happen to have anything of the sort I could even use some good judgement (maybe requiring an engineer to approve it maybe not, I would ask a shift sup to be sure) even put an LCD with a VGA port on it. Don't something "radical" like that before COTS as we knew it would have caused a QC guy to have a heart attack, which during his time in the hospital recovering he would drain an entire Sam's-Club sized box of G2 pens in the ways he would write us up.

Often acronyms around there had two meanings, the official public one, and the one the people who wrote it actually meant. There were some humorous ones thrown out there on occasion, some of which had entire program names changed when the right person actually figured out what was intended.

Cheaper Maybe

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

But only because the commercial companies took all the taxpayer paid research and built on it to create the commercial platforms. Good think the commercial companies don't have to pay that money back via patent royalties.

Re:Cheaper Maybe

[Karmashock]

All that research done by Pratt and Whitney... Boeing... Lockheed Martin...

If socialism were superior the Russians would have won the Cold War.

They didn't because its inferior. Stop for a moment and look at all your dumb arguments are apply them to the soviets. IF you were right, they should have been dramatically more successful. Instead they were dramatically less successful.

That 20th century cage match apparently isn't taught in schools these days. Socialism lost on everything but politics. And the political argument is sustained largely by ignorance and sophistry. Any time empiricism becomes relevant... it gets its head twisted off and spiked into the ground like a tent pole.

Re:Cheaper Maybe

[Karmashock]

First, communism as described my Marx is an oxymoron and can't exist because it requires too many contradictory things to happen. Its basically Marxist Valhalla. Its this magical place or state of existance that good Marxists can look forward to going to at some future date where everything is perfect, everyone is free from want, everyone is free from strife, everyone is free from stress, justice for all... its a children's fantasy.

Second, socialism is possible but only because its parasites on things that work. You can tell because ultimately what contains socialism is that it has to collect revenue from productive portions of the economy to pay for non-productive socialist portions of the economy.

Third, what the Soviets built was basically just autocratic totalitarianism mixed with delusional idealism. It was a grand experiment in centralized government authority over everything... and the results are fairly well documented. That's what that gets you.

So does communism look good on paper? It looks good on paper if you think elves, unicorns, and wizards casting spells looks good on paper. Whatever you opinion on that... I'll put that down to fancy one way or the other... regardless, none of that shit works in "real life". Communism requires a restructuring of human nature and was largely conceived of by someone that misunderstood the discoveries of Darwin. Darwin's Origin of the Species was all the rage at the time and Marx misunderstood its implications to mean that he could remold humanity into some other form relativity quickly by pouring the human sea into a different mold. Any educated person in the 20th or 21st century should be well aware that that is not how it works. You're looking at genetic engineering or thousands of years of eugenics to get that kind of result. It isn't happening.

I wouldn't fault the Soviet's implementation. That was not the mistake. The mistake was the objective in the first place is unrealistic or ignorant depending on how unkind... and honest one wishes to be. The Soviets could not have been expected to succeed. They could have implemented Socialism of course. Socialism functions to the extent it does because it parasites off systems that actually function. So you can do that. But that's about as close as you can come to anything Marx babbled about.

That Marxism has come through the 20th century with as many believers as it has is really a testament to the power of religious/magical thinking and perhaps the futility of expunging such thinking from human philosophy. The misguided followers of these ideologies have killed millions upon millions of people. Many of whom are their own people. Gulaged... death camped... mass graved... disappeared. An orgy of mass murder that dwarfs Hitler. But while the fascists are generally regarded as being the murderous madmen of their age... some how the Marxists get cast as misunderstood idealists. As some idealistic platitudes make up for the mayhem and misery.

To repeat and be clear, the Soviets didn't fail to implement the fairies and unicorns plan. That plan doesn't work in the same way that twiddling your fingers while mumbling latin doesn't cast fireballs from your finger tips. If you want to larp communism that's fine. Roleplay it. But expecting people to actually rely on it in any real sense is absurd. Communism is the Marxist afterlife. The magical promised land beyond the veil of time and reality. Its utopia... as in "no place"... its not a plan. Its fantasy.

Re:Bbbbut Capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

>I doubt it's that nefarious.

Then you haven't been involved in it. While working on a design for the shuttle, we'd finish a design, build and qual a widget. Before delivery, our manager would arbitrarily make some non functional requirement change (think paint color or wiring layout) and get the customer to agree.

To meet the process requirements, you'd have to go back two months and re-do all of the work for no functional change. In this one specific example half the people quit after six months on the merry-go-round. The trick is to finish and test early, then keep repeating the above process until the customer runs out of money then hand over what you have. There are many tricks that you can play, another is active incompetence where you make some terribly boneheaded decision that a fourth grader would question the rational and stretch out the process for weeks. I forgot to order the spectrum analyzer What???!!!!!????? You know it has a six week lead time and we told you four months ago and made you understand that we'd have twenty people sitting around twiddling their thumbs if we did not have it by this time. Yeah, my bad. Sorry about that.

Re:Bbbbut Capitalism

[Daemonik]

This stuff is why I don't understand people that consistently blame government for cost overruns, but never consider that corporations game the system to maximize their profits. We could probably cut the federal budget in half if the contractors working on government jobs stopped doing stuff like this to pad their spreadsheets.

Re:Generosity?

[Daemonik]

I wouldn't say the only win is reduced costs. Part of the purpose of programs like this are to spur innovation, create new industries and eventually grow the economy. Just because some few people can't see the immediate value of space exploration is exactly why the government needs to intercede, as they did for telephones, electrical utilities and other markets that require long term investment with no immediate returns for 20-30 years.

A bridge doesn't pay back 25% ROI the first quarter after it opens, which is why Wall Street will never build bridges.