National Security MUST come first. That means that at least 1 of each categories MUST be American. That does not mean that ALL of the win must go to Americans. There is a lot to like about the idea of having our partners provide part of the system. Keep it fair. If the nation has trade barriers and/or has their fixed against ours and/or has the gov subsidizing the bid, then it should not be allowed in. That would mean that China and India are absolutely out of any part of this. OTH, Brazil might be (not sure of their status).
By the way, I'm fairly certain that the current proposals only mean "outsourcing" in the sense of outsourcing to private US companies, rather than companies based elsewhere. In fact, much of the reason for doing this is to prevent a reliance on Russia. During the Augustine Committee meetings I think there were some questions directed to Europe's EADS about potential manned launches on the Ariane V, but I believe these would be too far off in the future to be of immediate relevance.
With NASA's current commercial COTS and CCDev programs only US companies have expressed an interest, which I suspect is because only US companies are eligible.
Re:Job #1 should be tracking asteroids
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There is no reasonable cost-benefit analysis where spending vast billions of dollars looking for asteroids which might hit us makes any sense.
Actually, according to NASA estimates it would take less than a billion dollars spread over 10-15 years to perform the necessary tracking, which I believe is well worth it.
Re:and if these companies made profit?
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This almost sounds like science fiction in which the evil doctrine of capitalism is let lose to contaminate the universe.
If the "evil doctrine of capitalism" is what's needed for human civilization to "contaminate the universe," then please, bring it on. Faster.
Re:What have they been doing until now?
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Are you saying that NASA's core competency is not space operations, or space systems development?
I'd say their core competencies are scientific research, technology development, beyond-LEO exploration (mostly unmanned, so far) and in-space construction. Well, and delivering jobs to key congressional districts.
It certainly isn't launch vehicle development, considering that NASA (well, mostly NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, which has particularly incompetent management) has had many launch vehicle projects go massively overbudget/fail (e.g. X-33, X-34, SLI, OSP) without a single success in the past 30 years or so.
Thank you for writing this. It's the best comment I've seen under this entire story.
Re:Outsourcing IS the problem when dishonestly don
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Explain why there is a need to play dirty pool and lobby to get the work to those Third World countries.
What the hell are you talking about? Nobody's talking about outsourcing spaceflight to third world countries.
Re:If I was an astronaut...
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
If I was an astronaut I would prefer not to have it outsourced, purely from a logical perspective. Being in space is all about perfection and control, and NASA can build from that vision. Private companies always come from the profit aspect above all else, which at some point may end up causing a part to be less perfect than it could be. In space that just isn't a question mark you really want to have.
When buying a plane ticket, do you similarly insist that it be on a government-built plane?
Re:What have they been doing until now?
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COTS, sure. But if you have to hire someone to build you something custom... then you probably want to just hire them directly, instead of funneling money to someone whose only job is to skim money between you and the person doing your work.
outsource only that which is either (1) not customized to you at all, or (2) entirely optional to your business.
Well yes, (1) is pretty much the point -- that NASA buy commercial launch services just like the DOD and commercial satellite companies do.
Re:What have they been doing until now?
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NASA May Outsource
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NASA is not a business. Therefore, absolutely none of the buzzword bingo applies here.
Ok, so then I'll restate it without using the buzzword lingo. With the Ares I, NASA has been trying (badly) to design their own rocket to get to low earth orbit (LEO), instead of using rockets which either already exist or are under development (e.g. Atlas V, Delta IV, SpaceX Falcon 9), with cost projections currently set to be about an order of magnitude more expensive than all of those other rockets combined. Instead of wasting all this money to try to compete against LEO providers and build an in-house rocket, NASA should just buy the lower-cost services from them, so NASA can focus their resources on beyond-LEO exploration and research. NASA actually cancelled most of their technology development programs when Ares I started going massively overbudget, and it'd be nice if NASA could bring some of those back.
The only way I could see it working is if NASA built the spam-can and designed it to be compatible with multiple launchers (e.g. Delta, Atlas, Falcon etc) so they could easily switch from one to the other for each launch.
Yes, I'm fairly certain that's the way they're planning on doing it: purchasing the services of a commercial capsule like the SpaceX Dragon, Orion Lite, Excalibur Almaz which can be launched on the currently-existing commercial rockets you mentioned. This minimizes development costs, insures that you're using a rocket which has been well-tested with unmanned launches, and lets you easily switch to a different launcher if one of them has problems.
On my country, outsourcing is the same as disaster. You pay the same for a poor service.
NASA has "outsourced" the launches of all its scientific probes since the 1990s or so, and that's worked rather well. The launch costs are maybe an order of magnitude less than the Space Shuttle, with a comparable track record.
Why this is important: Monopolies vs. competition
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· Score: 0, Redundant
A lot of people here seem to be missing the point with comments along the lines of "oh noes, outsourcing!" so I figure I should explain things in a way more grokkable to slashdotters. NASA's standard way of doing things is to have a single monopolistic supplier paid with a cost-plus contract, while the newer way involves having multiple companies competing for fixed-price contracts.
Under the cost-plus monopolistic way of doing things, a single company is chosen as sole supplier -- I'm sure slashdotters can appreciate why having a single monopolistic provider can be a problem. The "cost-plus" part means that the contractor is paid a multiple of whatever their development and production expenses are. That works well if you're in a "money is no object" scenario, but it means that the contractor has basically no incentive to be efficient or even finish work in a timely fashion, since they make just as much profit on development as on the final product (imagine if the software development projects you've worked on were like this). Of course, I'm sure the engineers work just as hard in any case, but it makes a big difference in how management is structured and how much bureaucracy gets in the way of engineers doing what needs to be done, as there's also substantially more paperwork in this scenario. NASA typically has an oversight role to make sure there isn't too much cost-plus waste going on, although this has gotten particularly bad with the Ares I since NASA decided to act as its own prime contractor, resulting in basically no oversight whatsoever (just look at all the Ares I problems which have been shoved under the rug and festered to see why this has been bad).
The new way of doing things, which NASA's been trying successfully with their COTS program, is to have multiple companies competing for fixed-priced contracts. The companies give initial estimates of cost during the initial contract phases, and if their estimates are poor they either eat the cost or stop getting paid. Payments are only made when specific milestones are accomplished and deliveries are made (e.g. pay a certain amount for delivering a particular amount of mass to orbit), so there's a big incentive to be as competitive as possible. Since you're not tied to a single company, NASA can just dump one company and switch to a competitor if somebody's underperforming, as they did when they switched from Rocketplane-Kistler to Orbital. Although some of these competitors are newcomers like SpaceX, there's also many well-established launch companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Orbital. Fixed-price competitive contracts is kind of an unusual way of business for many of the well-established companies, but they'll just have to either adapt or perish.
Finally, since there's multiple competing providers, companies (or teams within a company, so not all their eggs are in one basket) can try coming up with novel ways of delivering payloads to orbit. Since NASA isn't tying its entire fate to a single provider, individual providers have the flexibility to try to innovate and see if there's more cost-effective ways to launch payloads to orbit than the status quo. Once new launch methods have proven themselves in launching unmanned cargo, then they can transition to launching people.
If there's one thing worse than the government doing something, it's the government giving someone a de-facto monopoly to do it in the form of a government contract.
You're missing the point. The whole reason they're doing this is so they have multiple competing vendors for services, instead of just a single monopolistic contractor.
Off the top of my head, I wouldn't want to be on a space-flight where a less expensive, less capable part was used in order to save money.
You're making a massive logic error with your assumption that a part which is more expensive is somehow inherently more capable and safe. Do you also apply that logic to automobiles and airplanes?
You should consider applying for a job at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center upper management. You'd fit right in!
This is where SpaceX and other companies offering low cost space flight get it wrong, using cheap, off the shelf, parts may work for cars and even small single engine aircraft, but they are not reliable or robust enough for large commercial aircraft and especially not for use in space flight.
That's a cute example, but do you have any examples of off-the-shelf parts being used which are less than aerospace quality? For that matter, do you have an example from any time in the entire history of space launches that use of an off-the-shelf part has resulted in a launch failure, and switching to a non-COTS part would have prevented the failure?
The question I ask is: Once we choose these "commercial" launch companies, do they become just another contractor in bed with NASA, with cost increases, heavy oversight, and get flamed like LM, Boeing, etc frequently are?
As I've mentioned in other comments, even if it isn't particularly sexy, I really believe the way you structure your procurement contracts makes a huge difference. From what I understand, most NASA procurement tends to be cost-plus monopolistic single-contractor contracts, where the cost-plus profit multiplier is just as high for development as it is for the actual product, so there's much less incentive to be efficient or finish the product early; I'm sure the engineers work just as hard regardless of what type of contract they're working under, but it makes a big impact on the way a project is managed. You also have to deal with substantially more red tape on a cost-plus contract.
Things would be much improved by going for fixed-cost milestone-based contracts, sourced to multiple competing contractors. In that scenario management structures projects to be competitive and nimble, and if a company is underperforming, suffering overbloated costs, or not meeting its milestones, you just switch to one of its competitors. Of course, the problem is that you don't necessarily know beforehand which congressional district will be getting the funds, so that could make things more problematic from a political perspective (heck, just look at Sen. Shelby's opposition to diverting a miniscule fraction of some of the Constellation funding to COTS).
It is not commercial development if it is the taxpayer footing the bill. Show me a company that invested its own money.
You're missing the point. Even if development is non-commercial, what's important is the procurement process. NASA's big problem is using cost-plus contracts for procurement, rather than competitive fixed-price contracts.
How can commercial entities, who have so far demonstrated only toy rockets, possibly be closer to achieving space flight than NASA, who demonstrated that capability decades ago and has since done it countless times?
What are you talking about? The commercial entities launch many (large and small) rockets every year, many times more often than NASA:
Maybe I'm wrong, but doesn't NASA pay the commercial sector to build rockets to its own specifications?
It's actually even worse than that in the current situation, as NASA essentially decided to have NASA Marshall Space Flight Center act as designer and prime contractor for the Ares I rocket, with the commercial companies acting as subcontractors.
Ummm... NASA does not build its own rockets. NASA pays the commercial sector to build rockets.
Are you at all familiar with ESAS and the Ares I development? You're describing how things worked under the pre-ESAS plans, but then former administrator Michael Griffin threw those out and basically made NASA its own prime contractor.
IIRC, the Dragon cannot handle a re-entry from straight from the moon. It just isnt built for it.
It's not like this is some sort of unsolveable show-stopper. The Dragon is currently optimized for LEO reentry, but there's no reason it can't be upgraded. Some potential solutions:
* Use more PICA-X heat shield material * modify the trajectory to use a skip reentry * make use of in-space tugs and refueling to apply delta-v before reentering the atmosphere
I don't fully understand the Space-X hype. They don't have a good record at all really. Why does everyone want to trust the entire future of manned spaceflight to this one particular group?
I haven't seen anybody respectable seriously propose that. Most of the proposals I've seen have involved including SpaceX in commercial competitions between multiple providers and creating a robust market of LEO transportation potentially including companies like Orbital, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc.
The idea of a SDV (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle-Derived_Launch_Vehicle [wikipedia.org]) seems a lot better idea to me than this massive new launcher. Builds on known technology, a lot less up-front cost, fewer unknowns, etc.
A clarification: Orion is a capsule, not a launcher. NASA's current launcher is the Ares I, which has been having some major development problems (and many say fundamental design flaws), and looking likely to be cancelled. However, the Orion can also potentially be launched on a Shuttle-Derived Vehicle, or even a commercial launcher.
While NASA is plainly losing its edge, we shouldn't be so quick to turn to commercial means of space travel. Corporations are ultimately concerned only with turning a profit, not with the exploration of the Universe. We need NASA to be a science and research-centric agency.
The problem is that the current NASA has largely cut back on science and R&D, instead spending the money on trying to build rockets to compete with the commercial sector. What many are suggesting NASA do (including the White House's Augustine Committee) is purchase from the commercial sector for sending cargo (and eventually people) to orbit instead of building its own transportation system, so that NASA can use the money to focus on actual science and exploration beyond LEO.
Your comment is actually a little confusing -- could you elaborate on why NASA shouldn't turn towards the commercial sector for transportation? Why should we object to transportation companies making a profit if they're transporting cheaply and reliably?
Oh yes, I totally agree. From what I watched, it seemed that the consensus of the committee (esp. Bohdan Bejmuk) was that commercial transport contracts should definitely be open to the non-"NewSpace" companies like l-mart. It'll be interesting to see what happens now that Michael Griffin is no longer around to pressure the l-mart CEO into not participating.;)
One thing I've heard though is that there's apparently something in the EELV contract the ULA has with the DOD which either prevents bidding on COTS-like contracts, or makes it much more difficult. Do you happen to know anything about this?
Slashdot Mirror
I'd really appreciate it if people would explain why they think my comment is apparently "redundant" instead of just modding it down as such...
National Security MUST come first. That means that at least 1 of each categories MUST be American. That does not mean that ALL of the win must go to Americans. There is a lot to like about the idea of having our partners provide part of the system.
Keep it fair. If the nation has trade barriers and/or has their fixed against ours and/or has the gov subsidizing the bid, then it should not be allowed in. That would mean that China and India are absolutely out of any part of this. OTH, Brazil might be (not sure of their status).
By the way, I'm fairly certain that the current proposals only mean "outsourcing" in the sense of outsourcing to private US companies, rather than companies based elsewhere. In fact, much of the reason for doing this is to prevent a reliance on Russia. During the Augustine Committee meetings I think there were some questions directed to Europe's EADS about potential manned launches on the Ariane V, but I believe these would be too far off in the future to be of immediate relevance.
With NASA's current commercial COTS and CCDev programs only US companies have expressed an interest, which I suspect is because only US companies are eligible.
There is no reasonable cost-benefit analysis where spending vast billions of dollars looking for asteroids which might hit us makes any sense.
Actually, according to NASA estimates it would take less than a billion dollars spread over 10-15 years to perform the necessary tracking, which I believe is well worth it.
This almost sounds like science fiction in which the evil doctrine of capitalism is let lose to contaminate the universe.
If the "evil doctrine of capitalism" is what's needed for human civilization to "contaminate the universe," then please, bring it on. Faster.
Are you saying that NASA's core competency is not space operations, or space systems development?
I'd say their core competencies are scientific research, technology development, beyond-LEO exploration (mostly unmanned, so far) and in-space construction. Well, and delivering jobs to key congressional districts.
It certainly isn't launch vehicle development, considering that NASA (well, mostly NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, which has particularly incompetent management) has had many launch vehicle projects go massively overbudget/fail (e.g. X-33, X-34, SLI, OSP) without a single success in the past 30 years or so.
Thank you for writing this. It's the best comment I've seen under this entire story.
Explain why there is a need to play dirty pool and lobby to get the work to those Third World countries.
What the hell are you talking about? Nobody's talking about outsourcing spaceflight to third world countries.
If I was an astronaut I would prefer not to have it outsourced, purely from a logical perspective. Being in space is all about perfection and control, and NASA can build from that vision. Private companies always come from the profit aspect above all else, which at some point may end up causing a part to be less perfect than it could be. In space that just isn't a question mark you really want to have.
When buying a plane ticket, do you similarly insist that it be on a government-built plane?
COTS, sure. But if you have to hire someone to build you something custom... then you probably want to just hire them directly, instead of funneling money to someone whose only job is to skim money between you and the person doing your work.
outsource only that which is either (1) not customized to you at all, or (2) entirely optional to your business.
Well yes, (1) is pretty much the point -- that NASA buy commercial launch services just like the DOD and commercial satellite companies do.
NASA is not a business. Therefore, absolutely none of the buzzword bingo applies here.
Ok, so then I'll restate it without using the buzzword lingo. With the Ares I, NASA has been trying (badly) to design their own rocket to get to low earth orbit (LEO), instead of using rockets which either already exist or are under development (e.g. Atlas V, Delta IV, SpaceX Falcon 9), with cost projections currently set to be about an order of magnitude more expensive than all of those other rockets combined. Instead of wasting all this money to try to compete against LEO providers and build an in-house rocket, NASA should just buy the lower-cost services from them, so NASA can focus their resources on beyond-LEO exploration and research. NASA actually cancelled most of their technology development programs when Ares I started going massively overbudget, and it'd be nice if NASA could bring some of those back.
The only way I could see it working is if NASA built the spam-can and designed it to be compatible with multiple launchers (e.g. Delta, Atlas, Falcon etc) so they could easily switch from one to the other for each launch.
Yes, I'm fairly certain that's the way they're planning on doing it: purchasing the services of a commercial capsule like the SpaceX Dragon, Orion Lite, Excalibur Almaz which can be launched on the currently-existing commercial rockets you mentioned. This minimizes development costs, insures that you're using a rocket which has been well-tested with unmanned launches, and lets you easily switch to a different launcher if one of them has problems.
On my country, outsourcing is the same as disaster. You pay the same for a poor service.
NASA has "outsourced" the launches of all its scientific probes since the 1990s or so, and that's worked rather well. The launch costs are maybe an order of magnitude less than the Space Shuttle, with a comparable track record.
A lot of people here seem to be missing the point with comments along the lines of "oh noes, outsourcing!" so I figure I should explain things in a way more grokkable to slashdotters. NASA's standard way of doing things is to have a single monopolistic supplier paid with a cost-plus contract, while the newer way involves having multiple companies competing for fixed-price contracts.
Under the cost-plus monopolistic way of doing things, a single company is chosen as sole supplier -- I'm sure slashdotters can appreciate why having a single monopolistic provider can be a problem. The "cost-plus" part means that the contractor is paid a multiple of whatever their development and production expenses are. That works well if you're in a "money is no object" scenario, but it means that the contractor has basically no incentive to be efficient or even finish work in a timely fashion, since they make just as much profit on development as on the final product (imagine if the software development projects you've worked on were like this). Of course, I'm sure the engineers work just as hard in any case, but it makes a big difference in how management is structured and how much bureaucracy gets in the way of engineers doing what needs to be done, as there's also substantially more paperwork in this scenario. NASA typically has an oversight role to make sure there isn't too much cost-plus waste going on, although this has gotten particularly bad with the Ares I since NASA decided to act as its own prime contractor, resulting in basically no oversight whatsoever (just look at all the Ares I problems which have been shoved under the rug and festered to see why this has been bad).
The new way of doing things, which NASA's been trying successfully with their COTS program, is to have multiple companies competing for fixed-priced contracts. The companies give initial estimates of cost during the initial contract phases, and if their estimates are poor they either eat the cost or stop getting paid. Payments are only made when specific milestones are accomplished and deliveries are made (e.g. pay a certain amount for delivering a particular amount of mass to orbit), so there's a big incentive to be as competitive as possible. Since you're not tied to a single company, NASA can just dump one company and switch to a competitor if somebody's underperforming, as they did when they switched from Rocketplane-Kistler to Orbital. Although some of these competitors are newcomers like SpaceX, there's also many well-established launch companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Orbital. Fixed-price competitive contracts is kind of an unusual way of business for many of the well-established companies, but they'll just have to either adapt or perish.
Finally, since there's multiple competing providers, companies (or teams within a company, so not all their eggs are in one basket) can try coming up with novel ways of delivering payloads to orbit. Since NASA isn't tying its entire fate to a single provider, individual providers have the flexibility to try to innovate and see if there's more cost-effective ways to launch payloads to orbit than the status quo. Once new launch methods have proven themselves in launching unmanned cargo, then they can transition to launching people.
If there's one thing worse than the government doing something, it's the government giving someone a de-facto monopoly to do it in the form of a government contract.
You're missing the point. The whole reason they're doing this is so they have multiple competing vendors for services, instead of just a single monopolistic contractor.
Off the top of my head, I wouldn't want to be on a space-flight where a less expensive, less capable part was used in order to save money.
You're making a massive logic error with your assumption that a part which is more expensive is somehow inherently more capable and safe. Do you also apply that logic to automobiles and airplanes?
You should consider applying for a job at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center upper management. You'd fit right in!
This is where SpaceX and other companies offering low cost space flight get it wrong, using cheap, off the shelf, parts may work for cars and even small single engine aircraft, but they are not reliable or robust enough for large commercial aircraft and especially not for use in space flight.
That's a cute example, but do you have any examples of off-the-shelf parts being used which are less than aerospace quality? For that matter, do you have an example from any time in the entire history of space launches that use of an off-the-shelf part has resulted in a launch failure, and switching to a non-COTS part would have prevented the failure?
The question I ask is: Once we choose these "commercial" launch companies, do they become just another contractor in bed with NASA, with cost increases, heavy oversight, and get flamed like LM, Boeing, etc frequently are?
As I've mentioned in other comments, even if it isn't particularly sexy, I really believe the way you structure your procurement contracts makes a huge difference. From what I understand, most NASA procurement tends to be cost-plus monopolistic single-contractor contracts, where the cost-plus profit multiplier is just as high for development as it is for the actual product, so there's much less incentive to be efficient or finish the product early; I'm sure the engineers work just as hard regardless of what type of contract they're working under, but it makes a big impact on the way a project is managed. You also have to deal with substantially more red tape on a cost-plus contract.
Things would be much improved by going for fixed-cost milestone-based contracts, sourced to multiple competing contractors. In that scenario management structures projects to be competitive and nimble, and if a company is underperforming, suffering overbloated costs, or not meeting its milestones, you just switch to one of its competitors. Of course, the problem is that you don't necessarily know beforehand which congressional district will be getting the funds, so that could make things more problematic from a political perspective (heck, just look at Sen. Shelby's opposition to diverting a miniscule fraction of some of the Constellation funding to COTS).
It is not commercial development if it is the taxpayer footing the bill. Show me a company that invested its own money.
You're missing the point. Even if development is non-commercial, what's important is the procurement process. NASA's big problem is using cost-plus contracts for procurement, rather than competitive fixed-price contracts.
How can commercial entities, who have so far demonstrated only toy rockets, possibly be closer to achieving space flight than NASA, who demonstrated that capability decades ago and has since done it countless times?
What are you talking about? The commercial entities launch many (large and small) rockets every year, many times more often than NASA:
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/tracking/launchlog.html
I don't know where to get statistics for this but a commercial launch is something very common place.
You can see a list of recent worldwide launches here:
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/tracking/launchlog.html
As far as the US goes, the only non-commercial launches are the Space Shuttles, and there's quite a few commercial launches per Space Shuttle launch.
Maybe I'm wrong, but doesn't NASA pay the commercial sector to build rockets to its own specifications?
It's actually even worse than that in the current situation, as NASA essentially decided to have NASA Marshall Space Flight Center act as designer and prime contractor for the Ares I rocket, with the commercial companies acting as subcontractors.
Ummm... NASA does not build its own rockets. NASA pays the commercial sector to build rockets.
Are you at all familiar with ESAS and the Ares I development? You're describing how things worked under the pre-ESAS plans, but then former administrator Michael Griffin threw those out and basically made NASA its own prime contractor.
IIRC, the Dragon cannot handle a re-entry from straight from the moon. It just isnt built for it.
It's not like this is some sort of unsolveable show-stopper. The Dragon is currently optimized for LEO reentry, but there's no reason it can't be upgraded. Some potential solutions:
* Use more PICA-X heat shield material
* modify the trajectory to use a skip reentry
* make use of in-space tugs and refueling to apply delta-v before reentering the atmosphere
I don't fully understand the Space-X hype. They don't have a good record at all really. Why does everyone want to trust the entire future of manned spaceflight to this one particular group?
I haven't seen anybody respectable seriously propose that. Most of the proposals I've seen have involved including SpaceX in commercial competitions between multiple providers and creating a robust market of LEO transportation potentially including companies like Orbital, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc.
The idea of a SDV (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle-Derived_Launch_Vehicle [wikipedia.org]) seems a lot better idea to me than this massive new launcher. Builds on known technology, a lot less up-front cost, fewer unknowns, etc.
A clarification: Orion is a capsule, not a launcher. NASA's current launcher is the Ares I, which has been having some major development problems (and many say fundamental design flaws), and looking likely to be cancelled. However, the Orion can also potentially be launched on a Shuttle-Derived Vehicle, or even a commercial launcher.
While NASA is plainly losing its edge, we shouldn't be so quick to turn to commercial means of space travel. Corporations are ultimately concerned only with turning a profit, not with the exploration of the Universe. We need NASA to be a science and research-centric agency.
The problem is that the current NASA has largely cut back on science and R&D, instead spending the money on trying to build rockets to compete with the commercial sector. What many are suggesting NASA do (including the White House's Augustine Committee) is purchase from the commercial sector for sending cargo (and eventually people) to orbit instead of building its own transportation system, so that NASA can use the money to focus on actual science and exploration beyond LEO.
Your comment is actually a little confusing -- could you elaborate on why NASA shouldn't turn towards the commercial sector for transportation? Why should we object to transportation companies making a profit if they're transporting cheaply and reliably?
Oh yes, I totally agree. From what I watched, it seemed that the consensus of the committee (esp. Bohdan Bejmuk) was that commercial transport contracts should definitely be open to the non-"NewSpace" companies like l-mart. It'll be interesting to see what happens now that Michael Griffin is no longer around to pressure the l-mart CEO into not participating. ;)
One thing I've heard though is that there's apparently something in the EELV contract the ULA has with the DOD which either prevents bidding on COTS-like contracts, or makes it much more difficult. Do you happen to know anything about this?