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.