“SpaceX seems to be moving further from, not closer to, flying crewed Dragons. Doubt he’ll ever actually do it as long as the calculus shows the cost of failure outweighs the value of success.”

Explain. All public accounts show they are no shying from using their capsule for cargo or crew.

DCSCA wrote @ September 26th, 2010 at 8:18 pm

“ their U.S. taxpayer-refurbished launch pad to try to be a success. Could have built his own launching facilities in a number of places around the world but chose not to.”

SpaceX plans to spend $50M on their Vandenberg launch site, and they have said that is about what they spent on their LC40 one. Why do you think the site was refurbished at taxpayer expense?

“With his recent comments Musk has practically “bowed out” of “Commercial” Crew”

I disagree. In fact, I think it shows that he is going compete vigorously in any “commercial crew” competitions NASA is allowed to hold.

People keep forgetting that by next year SpaceX will have their commercial crew capsule certified by NASA for ISS operations – just not for carrying crew. But adding crew to an existing vehicle is not as complicated as designing, building and certifying a completely new vehicle like CST-100. SpaceX has a lot of advantages for any commercial crew competition, and they won’t let the opportunity pass.

“there is not going to be anything remotely like a “plain vanilla ISS crew contract.” Any such contract will have language incorporating shelves full of requirements. There are going to be emphatic but hopefully vague requirements written by Congressfolk like…”

Sure, NASA could go that route, and the House bill certainly wants to go that route. But Bolden has stated that they want to go a far simpler route, one based on their experiences with Soyuz. We’ll have to wait and see what happens.

“By gambling on the Democrats Musk won a nice fat contract in the short term but has lost most of his chances of having a strong relationship with NASA in the long term.”

What fat, short term contract? The COTS/CRS contract from the Bush/Griffin years? Or did they damage themselves with NASA on the NLS II 10-year launch services contract NASA just put them on? I have no idea what you’re alluding to.

And I don’t buy a lot of this “oh they greased the right palms” stuff for large competitive bids. One protest, and the GAO comes in and does a complete audit of the competition.

SpaceX is winning work because of what they have done, and what they have bid. Sure they are a new launch provider entrant, but OSC is just getting going on large launchers too, so to a certain degree NASA is not looking for long pedigrees.

DoD did play a significant role in helping the company get its start by purchasing a set of flights, a smart customer investment that had relatively little program risk and high potential payoff once lower cost and operationally efficient platforms became available. But DoD did not have to manage the development, and so a more streamlined and robust approach was taken. NASA is proposing to piggyback on Mr. Musk’s personal investment (and DoD’s early adoption), and is funding demonstration flights to their spec to validate the capabilities, and through commercial crew, the development of new and modified elements to serve their requirements.

I believe Mr. Musk will do quite well with or without NASA missions. I do not know how NASA will fare over the next decade if we are limited to procurement driven architectures and operations.

I would advise the self-proclaimed conservative commentators to re-read all of those Ayn Rand tomes they have so prominently displayed on their bookshelves.

What I’m referring to here is the fact that SpaceX is ramping up the production of their vehicles and hiring employees all over the place. If the only customers that SpaceX was going to be trying for was private commercial contracts, this is the wrong strategy to be taking as there simply aren’t the customers (yet) to sustain such a company. I am suggesting that it is going to be taking the better part of a decade for the new price point that SpaceX is establishing to work its way through the space investment gurus to pitch the idea of commercial spaceflight opportunities to non-geeks (aka those not currently investing in spaceflight enterprises) and to justify the return on income (ROI).

BTW, almost anybody should realize that the ROI on congressmen tends to be at least 100% and sometimes much, much more. Elon Musk getting into the Washington DC lobbying game simply is something that must be done if you are going to survive. Bill Gates made the huge mistake of dismissing Washington as a bunch of idiots who really didn’t matter to his company, and then he got the U.S. Department of Justice threatening to shut his company (Microsoft) down. Life was real awful for him and his company until he started playing the game, going to the cocktail circuit in DC and throwing money around with lobbying efforts. After that, for some reason the lawsuits by the DOJ seemed to disappear like the morning dew. It isn’t a pure coincidence either. Microsoft now has one of the largest lobbying presence in DC for any software company or for that matter any media company.

All this reminds me of another immigrant that came to California trying to make it big in the “high tech” transportation arena. A group of investors put together about $2 million dollars from area investors in California and headed to Washington for the purpose of coming up with a new business. All $2 million were completely spend in the period of about six months trying to wine and dine congressmen and White House staffers. After that effort, they landed a ground breaking contract that was comparable to the Apollo project in scope in spite of the fact that they were flat broke, had only a single engineer, and no manufacturing facilities to speak of or even an office anywhere other than in the DC area.

Who was it? Leland Stanford (the namesake of the university that bears his last name… well named after his son but that is splitting hairs). The project? The Trans-continental railroad that was approved during the Abraham Lincoln administration. At the time few thought it was even possible to build a railroad across the Rocky Mountains. Needless to say, Stanford was able to repay his investors with interest and keep a nice hunk of change for himself too.

It pays to work in Washington even though the sausage factory sometimes looks absolutely horrible from time to time. The one thing I will give credit to Elon Musk here is that by being involved with the lawmakers in DC, he is at least not going to be having a surprise by having some new law show up that is going to shut his company down or keep it from at least being able to compete for commercial contracts. That was a huge problem that did happen with projects like the Conestoga rocket, where crazy things like NASA offering competing services on the Space Shuttle dried up any market for their rockets…. and something that Jim Benson fought his whole life too. These were good people with excellent technical skills and folks that should have succeeded decades ago at getting commercial spaceflight a reality. If for some reason Elon Musk is going to succeed where others failed, I think it is in part because he is paying attention to what is happening in Washington and at least making his presence felt.

SpaceX if it wins “Commercial” Crew will turn into a NASA zombie, a path similar to the one taken by the once entrepreneurial commercial space startup Orbital Sciences. The dream that SpaceX will lower launch costs will be lost, except in the very narrow sense that it will still probably come in much lower than Ares-1 would have. But as a NASA zombie it won’t come in significantly lower than Soyuz for HSF and it will no longer be competitive in the real commercial market for satellite launchers. If however SpaceX bows out of or loses its bid for “Commercial” Crew and focuses on other customers, NASA’s monopsonistic power and distorting incentives will diminish. Given its great development efficiencies so far, SpaceX will have very good shot at substantially lowering launch costs for real commerce. This would be of the greatest possible benefit to the long-term cause of space development as well as constituting a much-needed return of the U.S. to a competitive advantage in the real commercial launch market.

Which is another good reason to be happy that Musk has dared to tell the truth and call out these Republican establishment bastards for who they are.

By gambling on the Democrats Musk won a nice fat contract in the short term but has lost most of his chances of having a strong relationship with NASA in the long term. Musk’s calling out of the current space committee Republicans is a cause to celebrate not only because in this business the truth in a ubiquitous atmosphere of stifling euphemisms is a breath of fresh air, but because SpaceX is a company I have increasingly been coming to admire, and the last thing I want to see is for them to become mired in the NASA astronaut bureaucracy. I think Musk has come to realize this too and with the Iridium contract he now has the opportunity to start distancing himself from the sordid business that is NASA contracting. Thus his increasingly blunt honesty.

Even though Beancounter gratuitously insulted me I agree with him that there is tremendous potential for Falcon 9 to become the most competitive launcher in the international market and to prosper in as well as be a major cause of the coming price war. SeaLaunch + SpaceX = big trouble for ILS and especially Arianespace, who are screaming like stuck pigs about the coming “glut” (i.e. the increasing competition) in the real commercial launch business. And that’s where the real space development action is, not this NASA Cold War cathedral nonsense.

Wow.

Your ego exceeds Elon’s by orders of magnitude if you think that he’s been paying any attention to anything that some weirdo on the Internet calling itself “Googaw” has been saying.