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

it's Bush's fault

[turkeydance]

somebody had to post it

Re:it's Bush's fault

[Anonymous Coward]

We would've also have accepted: "George W. Bush doesn't care about space people".

Re:it's Bush's fault

[ls671]

Wait until he meets the 100 sky people.

Generosity?

[BenJeremy]

NASA awarded a contract and will get full value from it. It wasn't charity.

In the end, if it reduces the cost of lifting payloads to orbit, it will be the government that will be the true beneficiaries.

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.

Re:Generosity?

[taiwanjohn]

Exactly. And I'd add that Elon had already "financially saved" the company before NASA awarded the contract. If that fourth F1 flight had not reached orbit, and then NASA had still awarded the contract, then I'd agree with the characterization in the headline. But SpaceX earned that contract based on performance. And experience since then has shown that this was a very smart investment by the government.

Re:Bbbbut Capitalism

[plopez]

In this case the right way to do it was to hire lobbyists so you can suck off of the government teat.

Re:Bbbbut Capitalism

[catchblue22]

In this case the right way to do it was to hire lobbyists so you can suck off of the government teat.

The companies that are really sucking at the government teat are Lockheed Martin and Boeing who collectively own ULA. They supply launches under "Cost Plus" contracts. Basically the government pays the cost, as decided by the company, plus a guaranteed cost margin. This causes incentives to inflate costs through hiring too many managers and by choosing expensive complicated designs. SpaceX saves the government money by doing launches under fixed price per service contracts. The government pays a fixed price for launches; this creates incentives for SpaceX to save money. SpaceX has become the world's most affordable launcher. They are already cheaper than the Chinese and Russians, even without reusing their rockets.

Re:Bbbbut Capitalism

[tsotha]

This causes incentives to inflate costs through hiring too many managers and by choosing expensive complicated designs.

I doubt it's that nefarious. Cost inflation happens in any large organization that isn't actively trying to prevent it. And they do have some incentive to keep costs under control - there's only so much money to go around, and projects that look to be more expensive than they're worth tend to get cancelled.

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:Cheaper Maybe

[Dorianny]

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.

Re:Cheaper Maybe

[Cytotoxic]

You are right! There is No True Scotsman!

Not China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, or Vietnam.

Not the ones that tried and failed, like the Soviet Union: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, or Uzbekistan. Not Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mongolia, or Yemen.
Not the Soviet-controlled Eastern bloc countries like Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany (East), Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia.
Not Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Rep. of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, or Slovenia.
Not Angola, Benin, Dem Rep. of Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, or Mozambique.

But other than those....

Re:Cheaper Maybe

[dunkelfalke]

So any capitalist country that is less successful than USSR has been would disprove your argument at once? Because, you know, there are a lot of them.
Besides, if going from a backwards illiterate agrarian country that has been devastated in two world wars to sending the first man in space despite an economic war against them by the rest of the developed world is not the very definition of success, then what is?

Re:Cheaper Maybe

[NoImNotNineVolt]

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

Terrible examples. None of these companies invest significantly in pure research.

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

Non sequitur, affirming the consequent.

They didn't because its inferior.

Repeating that same unsupported assertion.

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.

I don't think anyone's arguing that a corrupt dictatorship leads to optimal outcomes. You seem to be falsely drawing an equivalence between despotism and socialism.

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.

Hi, I'm a political refugee from a Soviet satellite state. I really appreciate the history lesson, grounded in your comprehensive understanding of these matters, sir. With insights like these, it's apparent that you're an accomplished academic in this discipline, as your intimate knowledge of life behind the Iron Curtain dwarfs even my own.

Or you're just spewing bullshit. Actually, yea, I think that's it. Carry on with your Red Scare, though.

Re:Cheaper Maybe

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

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.

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

-- Much of which was paid for by tax dollars, again if Space-X and all had to pay patent royalties or raise VC dollars to do the research they would have never made it.

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

-- When did socialism or communism enter into the conversation?

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.

-- Aren't you a bit confused, the Soviet Union claimed to be Communist not Socialist, different economic systems. The Scandinavian version of socialism seems to be doing quite nicely. Also FYI the United States implements some socialist bits quite nicely, or maybe you have never noticed how well the Interstate road system works.
  -- FYI I served 25yrs in the USAF, mostly during that "cage match" so get off your high horse about people not having a clue.

Re:Cheaper Maybe

[real gumby]

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.

In the case of the space program, you have it exactly backwards. The Soviet space program got very little government support. Korolev had trouble getting funding and had the factories building and selling non-rocket machinery in order to raise the money necessary to build rockets. In fact the soviets had several competing space efforts.

Whereas the US responded with a huge, centrally-planned bureacracy that still exists today, with all the success one can expect from such an approch

I agree with you that communism was a disaster, and a largely unmitigated one, but nothing is purely black and white.

And SpaceX (and others) are saving NASA

[gman003]

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)

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.

Why SLS?

[Michael Woodhams]

From TFA: "The next president, or some in Congress, may begin asking why NASA is spending billions to develop its own heavy-lift rocket when SpaceX already has one."

As I recall, within about a year of taking office, Obama tried to kill the SLS (Nasa's heavy rocket) on this reasoning (that private companies could do the job better, given the chance, and secondarily that the funding NASA was getting for SLS was insufficient to achieve anything in a reasonable time frame) but Congress resurrected it.

Can anyone who has followed this more closely comment on the political history of COTS, and in particular the attitude of Bush and then Obama, and Congress/Senate, to COTS and SLS?

Re:Why SLS?

[XXongo]

From TFA: "The next president, or some in Congress, may begin asking why NASA is spending billions to develop its own heavy-lift rocket when SpaceX already has one."

Because SpaceX doesn't "already have one."

Falcon 9's payload is 13 tons to LEO. That's not a heavy-lift rocket.

SLS's payload is 130 tons to LEO. SpaceX has announced plans to build a heavy lift rocket, but they don't "already have it".

Re:Why SLS?

[gman003]

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.

Re: Why SLS?

[Areyoukiddingme]

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.

Re:Why SLS?

[thrich81]

You say that SLS payload is 130 tons to LEO like it is already built. It's not. The Falcon 9 Heavy is a lot closer to operational capability with a payload of 53 tons to LEO. The best estimates of launch dates I can find for both vehicles are: SLS -- Nov 2018, Falcon 9 Heavy -- late 2016. By the time SLS flies its first test flight it is very likely that Space X will indeed have an operational super heavy lift launch vehicle.

Re: Why SLS?

[jnaujok]

That's simply not true. SpaceX designed the Falcons from the beginning to meet the requirements for Man-Rating. They met all the specs and all the safety margins. The only reason it hasn't been fully man rated yet is that they haven't finished the Dragon 2 test program through all the steps.

But just like the SLS, it was designed from day one to be man-rated.

The only "pencil whipping" by the Air Force was to allow it to launch national security payloads, and that was after it had completed a certain number of certification flights with civilian payloads. After the launch failure last June, they went right back into a probationary status until the accident was explained and dealt with. There's really been no special treatment of SpaceX, it just seems that way because they've been launching a lot more often than the ULA guys did to get certified.

Re:In our rush to heap praise on George W. Bush...

[__aaclcg7560]

What school did you go to that was only 3K for a full year of tuition, much less books?

Community college. I already had an A.A. degree in General Education. Adding an A.S. degree in Computer Programming on top of that meant taking the courses in that major.

That also neglects the increased cost in transportation, although I suppose in your case housing was fixed cost unless you had to move to attend classes.

I was working 60 hours a week and teaching Sunday school at the time. Apartment rent came out of my regular paycheck. I lived next door to the community college, so I just walk to class.

If you did an "online" university you got screwed - no accreditation.

I did several online classes through the community college. Because the classes I needed to graduate got cancelled several semesters in the row, I took three them as self-study classes with the dean being my supervising instructor. I made the president's list for maintaining a 4.0 GPA in my major upon graduation.

Isn't this why NASA was created?

[mykepredko]

When it comes right down to it, wasn't NASA created to foster American companies and inspire the next generation of Scientists, Technologists, Engineers and Mathematicians?

Kudos to them believing in SpaceX and I hope that they continue to promote and support other up and coming companies.

Business as usual

[jodido]

This is how the entire aerospace/aviation industry has functioned from the beginning. Government pays for R&D and private industry capitalizes on it. Boeing's 747 came from work done to develop the C-5. If you're shocked by this story then you haven't been paying attention for the last fifty years.

Re:Bbbbut Capitalism

[dbIII]

Sadly a lot of it is nefarious.
Take a look at most orgs during boom times and it's not hard to spot the crooks. Many are quite flashy with their looted wealth when they think the shareholders or customers are not looking.

Re: Bbbbut Capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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:Bbbbut Capitalism

[religionofpeas]

The problem is that government isn't a very tough negotiator. There's little incentive to do so when it's not your money.

Re:if obama could

[Daemonik]

I'll get upset when he stands on an aircraft carrier with a big "Mission Accomplished" banner.

Re:Bbbbut Capitalism

[JonBoy47]

All launch customers desire "mission assurance", that is, effective management of the risk involved in getting their payload into space. Commercial customers achieve this mission assurance by buying insurance that pays out in the event a launch failure. In lieu of purchasing insurance, the US Government "carefully shepherds" taxpayers' money by incentivizing ULA, via cost-plus award fee, to design and build their launch vehicles with an extremely high attention to detail, achieving a level of mission success that is the envy of the launch industry.

ok wait a minute there Captain Spin...

[stinky wizzleteats]

You're crediting George W Bush with wise and foresighted... government spending? We don't need George W Bush to demonstrate the utility of government spending in spurring innovation that the private sector wouldn't otherwise be able to afford. Kennedy did that in the 60s.

Re:Welfare

[EricTDuckman1414]

Both parties believe in welfare, they only differ on who should get the dough; poor people on one side, and corporations on the other.

Poor people voting for democrats make sense. Poor people voting for republicans are just idiots

Actually, it's poor people AND corporations on one side, ONLY corporations on the other.

Re:Bbbbut Capitalism

[Daemonik]

That, frankly, is the fault of voters, who don't mind the corporate graft so much when it benefits their state.

Re:Bbbbut Capitalism

[khallow]

Can't have parasites without food. And here. the government funding is the food source.

Re: Bbbbut Capitalism

[sphealey]

Three gub'mint pensions actually (University of California, State of California, and United States Government).

Much like the anti-government crusader Paul Ryan who used his Social Security survivor benefits to pay his college tuition (quite legitimately - that's what the program was created to do) then immediately embarked on a lifelong career cashing government paychecks while campaigning on the evils of... government.

sPh

Re:Credit

[jfdavis668]

The difference is that Bush isn't claiming credit, people are crediting him.

Re: Bbbbut Capitalism

[aaarrrgggh]

Tend to agree; government agencies tend to have one exceptional person near the top and a whole lot of "others" filling the ranks. There are so many bad measures to control costs pushed onto contractors that it drives up compliance costs to insane levels. One person in my office has a full time job just dealing with invoices.

Not all government organizations are the same though. Generally it is when one gets a windfall of cash to spend that everything goes out the window. The $trillions of major jnrastructure upgrades will fall into this trap: it is cheaper to invest consistently over time than defer work and let it ballon up.

Re:Bbbbut Capitalism

[KGIII]

> SpaceX saves the government money by doing launches under fixed price per service contracts.

I love me some SpaceX but, unless I'm missing something, you can't actually say that. Why? Because it's not true. SpaceX has done no such thing.

Now, ideally, they *might* do so in the *future* but, as of yet and unless I'm missing something, nothing even remotely like that is true.

Am I missing something?

Re:Bbbbut Capitalism

[solartear]

The Commercial Resupply Services contract is fixed cost and has had SpaceX supply the ISS 7 times already. At $133 million per mission, a traditional NASA cost-plus contract would have cost much more.