Why Would RpK Want to Continue COTS?

Rocketplane Kistler (RpK) has written a letter to NASA seeking to overturn the agency's decision to terminate RpK's COTS Space Act Agreement.  NASAspaceflight.com has some interesting excerpts.  In the letter, RpK has a delicate task:  (1) It must state that all of RpK's problems are due to NASA actions; and (2) it must state why NASA should reconsider its decision even though RpK is saying such bad things about the agency.  I don't blame RpK for making its case robustly, but I wonder why RpK would wish to continue COTS, especially if what the letter says about NASA is true.  COTS contemplates RpK putting up most of the money -- 70% -- for the program, after all.

As stated previously, I have a minimum of high regard for the way that NASA has done businesses in the past.  It is not a reliable partner.  Its actions are at best capricious.  NASA is the type of customer where you don't know for sure whether the checks will clear.  Given these attributes, why would any reasonable businessperson put NASA on a critical path?  Fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders dictate otherwise, even if your stomach or conscience could take it.

It appears to me that NASA was realistic about its attributes when it structured the COTS program.  The program only makes sense for a business if NASA is perceived as an expendable junior partner -- i.e.,  if the business were going to do a program like COTS no matter NASA's involvement.  This structure also protects the American taxpayers against a bait-and-switch from a commercial program to a traditional government cost-plus program.  Apparently, RpK's business plan conceived of NASA's business as central to its plan.

Once RpK's Space Act Agreement is terminated, we could have another round of suitors for the COTS money.  But none of these other suitors appear to be designing and building hardware no matter NASA's actions.  They all appear to be waiting for NASA to be the senior partner.  In this respect, probably they are in the same position as RpK.

I note that there are other programs out there that don't appear to be angling for COTS money -- Armadillo Aerospace and Blue Origin are two examples.  Lastly, of course there is SpaceX, which is receiving COTS money, but had its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule in development well before COTS.  SpaceX appears to have approached COTS as an opportunity to do some marketing with NASA for space station-related and non-space station-related business.

Comments

[spacebuff]

Space-X have also made NASA their anchor customer for Dragon. Their whole Dragon effort, as with Bigelow's efforts, have far too small of a commercial market to justify their costs unless the bulk of the costs are to be recouped through future NASA contracts.

Elon Musk is just a better politician than the Rocketplane people. It's the same old NASA contractor politics. Nothing new here except the "alt.space" pretense as a cover.

[Daniel Schmelzer]

This is not quite true. SpaceX conceived of the Falcon 9 with human spaceflight in mind and was proceeding with the rocket no matter the NASA business.

It's tough to know whether Musk was planning on NASA business for the Dragon. As I recall, SpaceX did work on Dragon well before it won a COTS contract. To be sure, the COTS contract has accelerated Dragon development.

[nick]

"Space-X have also made NASA their anchor customer for Dragon."

True, but more broadly Space-X has signed up other customers for Falcon 9, including a variety of commercial satellites. RpK has not, which is why it couldn't get investor funding. Orbital Sciences is a far more mature company than either, it already has a large base of shareholders and so easily meets NASA's criteria, but their shareholders will be rather angry if they can't follow through by getting many non-NASA customers for the souped-up Taurus.

Calling these R&D programs "off the shelf" already strains the definition of that phrase. RpK's complete dependence on NASA broke it completely.

Bigelow's finances, if they are to come from anyone but Bigelow himself, depend on a multiplicity of foreign government customers, and of the U.S. government allowing such competition to the ISS (Bigelow can easily be stopped under ITAR). I'm not holding my breath, but Bigelow is not out their begging others for money so he can do whatever he wants.

It's silly for alt.space folks to dream up plans whose main realistic source of revenue is NASA and then complain about NASA's behavior. In any business the paying customer is king. If you don't like NASA, stop trying to make cheap knock-offs of preposterously uneconomical NASA projects. Even if reduced in cost by two orders of magnitude, which is highly unlikely, the vast majority of what NASA does makes no business sense, including their entire manned space program. Instead of mimicking NASA, make something useful to people on earth, like a neat suborbital trip, or a better comsat, or a better way to launch satellites, or something similar that you can actually get people to directly pay their own money for.