“The question is not, if this or that individual company can perform. The question is if 10 companies were funded at a fixed price, milestone based contract, would we have a couple companies flying or not at the end and is that price lower than what was produced under the cost plus Constellation method.”

Well I think performance is a big question, because not every company can scale up from small to big and still perform the same. SpaceX benefits from a CEO that has scaled companies before, and they have had the money to do things right. RpK failed COTS, which is a good example.

However I see Orion/MPCV and Commercial Crew as two separate solutions to two different challenges. Orion/MPCV is oriented towards exploration, whereas Commercial Crew is oriented towards point-to-point transportation. Because of those differences, it’s impossible to do an apple-to-apples comparison.

Could Rutan or T/Space have produced an operational commercial crew system? Sure. Could they have produced an operational exploration vehicle that met NASA’s needs? I think Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman would be better at that, since they have the in-house skill sets for that type of work, whereas Rutan and T/Space would need to hire that kind of talent (and big scaling has big risks).

That said, I think we are starting to see the commercial aerospace and NASA type standards getting closer. COTS, CCDev and CCiCap are doing a lot of cross-polination, with commercial aerospace understanding NASA a little better, and NASA getting more comfortable with commercial aerospace.

Having worked for largest government contractors, I see that they can build great products. But they need clean specifications if they are to bid something fixed-price, because change means risk for both the government and the contractor.

But most of our innovation comes from small companies and they have a low tolerance for risk from a financial standpoint, which is what fixed-price contracts represent. So whatever solution to this dilemma is pushed, I hope small companies can continue to compete for important parts of our future in space.

Yeah, I get pretty burned up as well.

I suppose, for that matter, that is why most posters come here: to vent their frustrations.

I suppose on the bright side, our space sector is not as screwed up as Russia’s.

Oh, well, at least the Soyuz is flying.

The question is not, if this or that individual company can perform. The question is if 10 companies were funded at a fixed price, milestone based contract, would we have a couple companies flying or not at the end and is that price lower than what was produced under the cost plus Constellation method.

We know what went into space under the cost plus Constellation, Orion, SLS method and what it cost us, we know what went into space under COTS and what it cost us. For me .. no contest.

The companies have to put more of their own skin into the game so you are going to weed out the firms not strong enough to compete at lot sooner and cheaper.

Or am I way off here?

But that’s EXACTLY the premise on which economies come from commercial space. It’s the vendor who knows what they can build, and has a very good idea how much it will cost. In fact, their investors have made very sure that these costs are well vetted. If NASA comes in and says, OK, you’ll build THIS, the way we want it, in the color and flavor we want it (but sorta sorta like what you say you can build), all bets are off. The vendor can’t be as sure about costs. NASA is asking them to build something that the vendor may have some experience with, but it’s not what they very carefully priced out for themselves. So the costs they come up with are based on interpolations and extrapolations.

Commercial space is identically where the supplier decides what they think the market will want, and understands exactly how to build it. NASA can buy it, if it meets their needs. If it doesn’t quite meet their needs, then those needs might have to bend a bit. In classic government procurement, “needs” don’t bend once procurement starts. Simply can’t happen.

Now, as to whether ten Bigelow BA330’s could have met the needs of ISS, it’s not at all clear. Those needs might have had to bend a whole lot. But I’ll be starry eyed like you and say — why not?

“When the CEV was announced and all the bids came in, Burt Rutan and T/Space said 5 million a seat for a four passenger capsule.”

Just as we saw with the ATK bid for CCiCap, some companies that look like they are qualified to bid on a contract really aren’t, or at least they submitted a bid that doesn’t look doable for a number of reasons. Or Griffin rigged the bid process – hard to tell.

“All those bids were tossed, the ESAS came in and suddenly we had the pork train nightmare, Ares I. 12 billion dollars later and congress canceling Constellation, we have instead the new SLS and Orion and more billions being spent.”

Lots of wrong things went into the decisions and costs associated with Constellation. The Orion itself was whipsawed around design-wise by the lack of Ares I definition, so that gets back to focusing on the definition phase of a contract – someone (i.e. Griffin) should have stood up said “Whoa, we’re not going to continue on Orion until the Ares I performance specs are locked down”.

However, forcing Lockheed Martin to submit a firm-fixed price for Orion before Ares I specs were locked down wouldn’t have been a good idea – what weight and capability do they assume?

I do understand and agree to a point.

When the CEV was announced and all the bids came in, Burt Rutan and T/Space said 5 million a seat for a four passenger capsule.

All those bids were tossed, the ESAS came in and suddenly we had the pork train nightmare, Ares I. 12 billion dollars later and congress canceling Constellation, we have instead the new SLS and Orion and more billions being spent.

Now … call me a starry eyed dreamer in the ability of American entrepreneurs and our capitalist system, but we could have funded 10 burt rutans in that same time and leased 10 Bigelow BA 330’s a year and still had billions in change.

Having did a couple smaller government construction contracts that had to be bid before you actually got to tear into the structure to see what the actual damages were to be repaired they had to be basically blind bids. But I could not even imagine trying to bid 100k to 200k for a 10,000 dollar remodel and repair job. Unless you were planning on using golden nails, you would not need that much money, because it would be impossible to justify spending it all. The only way to get away with that kind of bid would be a cost plus non competitive bidding arrangment.

So the equation is rather simple:

Does the cost of the abuse, overweigh the results of the legit cost plus bids that actually deliver a working product for a reasonable price.

Are we going to suffer more by the loss of the couple projects that are successful or are we suffering more from the opportunity costs of the loss of all other hardware and services we now cannot afford because of the cost plus abuse?

A few points about cost-plus. Firstly that, yes, we’ve all been aware of many low bids from not-the-usual-suspects. In my experience, these are bids from suspects whose credibility is questionable.>>

a lot of these come from NASA. go back to the original space station proposals which were 16 people in various configurations for 8 billion in 84 dollars…as Ed Boland told one of the NASA geeks “if you build this for 8 billion in constant dollars I’ll eat my hat”…he wasnt wrong RGO

You have to look at it from a business perspective. Cost-plus contracts are used when there is not enough definition for companies to submit fixed-price bids. NASA one-off programs are great examples of this, because no one – not even NASA – knows what the final specs are supposed to be for products like MSL or JWST>>

This is precisely the mentality that should be changed. The only reason that these projects are not defined is that the notion of them is always “open ended” and scaled to the reality of the cost plus environment…

It is not impossible to build these projects on fixed price; its just that they have to be thought through; more then just “on the back of anapkin”. RGO