The Independent by Adam Minter 6/8/2020
The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule that’s orbiting the Earth with two U.S. astronauts is the picture of New Space Age glamour. It’s a sleek, stylish commercially made capsule that’s destined to be featured beside Italian sports cars in future design textbooks. Just don’t tell that to Elon Musk, SpaceX’s chief executive and chief designer. “Is a Ferrari more reliable than a Toyota Corolla or a Honda Civic?†he once asked a space journalist. The answer, of course, is that the simpler sedans are far more reliable than the well-crafted sports car. So SpaceX, Musk made clear, was going to make Corollas.
It’s a practically minded outlook for a company founded on the galactically large ambition to transform humanity into a multiplanetary species. But Musk and SpaceX implicitly understand something that national space programs haven’t really accepted: Success in space exploration isn’t, ultimately, about achieving “firsts†like the moon landing. Rather, it’s repeat business that will establish moon colonies and Musk’s Martian city. To get that business, SpaceX has to show that national space programs, with their expensive, Ferrari-like rockets, capsules and contractors, won’t get there. On Saturday, it succeeded.
The 20th century space race wasn’t about the money, it was about the record books. The respective financial strengths of the U.S. and Soviet systems certainly played a role, but when national pride is at stake, performance matters more than costs. For decades, NASA, in particular, internalized that priority by adopting cost-plus contracts with its contractors. Under these arrangements, NASA agrees to pay the value of a project’s development costs, plus an associated fee (often about 10%). It’s an excellent system for encouraging contractors to invest in difficult, long-term projects with hazy costs.
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https://www.theindependent.com/opinion/columnists/manned-flight-just-one-step-for-spacex/article_40f804be-a77a-11ea-8530-d79e296bc432.html
