Shuttle has flown crews into space for decades. SpaceX has flown nobody.

Cheerleaders wear skirts and stay on the sidelines. How much revenue from Australian sources invested in SpaceX…. numbers, please.

Congrats to SpaceX for duplicating a feat in 2010 accomplished by NASA 46 years ago and taking America back to the future. Looking forward to the true test– a crewed flight, which is the only test that really matters. Tick-tock, tick-tock.

See what I find really really odd is that people like Oler and some others (Major Tom maybe?) who claim to be Republicans can see themselves associated with the likes of amightywind and Whittington. Not that it seems reasonable to be a Democrat if DCSCA is one of them mind you. Maybe it’s time for 2 additional parties?

The obsession of the current Republican crop with defeating all that this WH does is pathetic. They claim they put the country first when all they do is put themselves first so much so they don’t care to have the country in shambles to try and prove a point they cannot make any longer.

Now I will keep hoping that this WH has a 2nd go and that they finally say something like “oh well I changed my mind and I am going to do all I thought I would do before the elections, see I got some political capital and I plan to use it”.

Hope springs eternal…

oddly enough what has changed over the years is YOUR definition of commercial space, not the notions behind it.

In a piece I wrote for The Weekly Standard but you asked to have your name attached to, and took a check from TWS for, we defined commercial space and dealt with the thunderheads of that era who defined commercial space as narrowly as you now do.

With the payments for commercial space product being less in total then the shuttle takes in a monthly period…your transition to your current belief system seems more politics driven then space politics driven.

Obama hatred run wild?

Robert G. Oler

Based on what evidence? NASA’s 2010 Authorization Act, which enshrines all the major human space flight elements of the Administration’s FY 2011 budget request for NASA — terminating Ares I, retaining Orion, funding commercial crew, extending ISS to 2020, investing in exploration technology — passed the House on a bipartisan basis by a large margin. They’re now proposing the same for a year-long FY 2011 appropriations continuing resolution.

Don’t make stuff up.

“and is actually, with its heavy reliance on government subsies, anti commercial”

A subsidy is financial assistance to a business or industry sector to stem the decline of that industry, increase the prices of its products, or encourage more labor hiring.

COTS, CRS, and CCDev do none of those things. Commercial space flight is not an industry in decline, its prices do not need support, and the additional labor hiring is a side benefit.

The purpose of these programs is to fill the void left by Shuttle retirement and Constellation’s failure. The government (NASA) desperately needs a domestic source of human ETO transport and is paying companies like Boeing, OSC, and SpaceX to build and supply it. Unlike, say, subsidies to pay farmers to keep their land fallow to increase produce prices, NASA is paying for a product and a service that it needs in COTS, CRS, and CCDev.

Using your erroneous definition and lack of logic, any spending at NASA to buy anything the agency needs — to build a satellite, operate the Space Shuttle, create an experiment for the ISS, or just purchase copier paper — is a subsidy. That’s patently idiotic.

“and very political.”

There’s nothing political about it. The COTS and CRS competitions that SpaceX is launching under today were started and conducted under the Bush II Administration. These were open competitions that Kistler and SpaceX, and then OSC, won fairly. Less than $500 million has been spent on them. Since Bush II, the only other commercial space flight spending that’s been undertaken at NASA is the CCDev effort and that’s only $50 million. The Bush II Administration spent almost ten times more on commercial space than the Obama Administration has spent to date.

How is that “political” to a conservative? Don’t you think at all before you post?

“Government subsidized crony capitalism”

COTS, CRS, and CCDev were open competitions with a couple dozen competitors. If you have to beat out 20-odd other competitors to win a competition, by definition, you’re not a “crony” of the government. You don’t have any special relationship with government officials — you having to compete on an even playing field just like everyone else.

If you want an example of crony capitalism, then look at Constellation, where billions of dollars were awarded on a sole-source basis to ATK in the absence of any competition to support the development of an Ares I design that was chosen by the NASA Administrator based on an internal study, the appendices for which were never officially released, and was overseen by an ATK executive who was appointed Associate Administrator at NASA.

Look in the mirror before you throw these baseless accusations through your glass house.

Cripes…

SpaceX is on the pad with an operational Dragon after fixing cracks in it’s second stage engine nozzle. It also identified the root cause of those cracks and fixed that as well.
They’re trying to fly. Missed the first window, now going for the second. Good luck SpaceX. NASA surely needs you.

BTW. Tell me how NASA’s doing on the ET cracks – found them all, fixed them, found the root cause, fixed it. No! Gee I’m surprised – NOT!

Whittington keeps repeating the word “subsidies,” as if it means something.

It does. If commercial spaceflight were a great business vehicle development would be funded by private capital, not Obama favors. It is not. SpaceX receives huge subsidies. Those subsidies support only a rediscovery of the technology NASA mastered 40 years ago.

The CRS contracts, which are the largest by far to-date, were awarded during the Bush administration. There are no allegations of impropriety that I am aware of in the CCDev contracts, nor is there any evidence that future crew launch services contracts would be any less above-board.