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NASA has had spectacular success though...just with SpaceX, who got half the money Boeing did to develop a human rated craft.

• metadat 2y ago
  That's not NASA doing anything, though. In fact it's NASA doing nothing except saying what they want to a genie. Rub rub.
  • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > That's not NASA doing anything COTS was a risky paradigm shift. And SpaceX continues to extensively use NASA resources, to say nothing of building on its decades of work.
    • asadotzler 2y ago
      This. COTS was critical. Space Act Agreements are how things get done and optimizing for fixed priced, milestone based SAAs has been great for all "routine" things that NASA doesn't have to do extensive novel R&D to make happen, things like transportation, which is all space launch is these days. SpaceX lives because of COTS and that's great. But that's also a signal that space launch is boring and was boring even back in 2005. It's commodity infrastructure and SpaceX, unlike Boeing and others, has a workable commodity style approach so they're eating everyone's lunch. Then SpaceX developed reusability because of its Mars ambitions and re-usable Falcon sealed the deal on industry dominance. No one can touch SpaceX's ~$20M F9 launch cost so SpaceX gobbles up any contracts that aren't locked down by law.
      • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > that's also a signal that space launch is boring and was boring even back in 2005 It wasn’t boring so much as gated. If anything, nobody recognised it had become a commodity outside a couple crazy dudes in Hawthorne and West Texas. The majors still talked about it like they were doing dark magic.