[Micele]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Hoofdstraat

Nasa heeft SpaceX gered in den beginne door faciliteiten te leveren, ontwikkeling te betalen en voorkeur in cargo. Daar heb ik niets tegen, dat is een doel van Nasa.

De Nasa heeft SpaceX nergens gered, eerder omgekeerd:

https://www.accuweather.com/en/weath...-mars/70002179

“We all know and love NASA, and their achievements are legendary, but it’s a federal agency that inevitably has to abide by certain laws,” said Dale Ketcham, the chief of Strategic Alliances for Space Florida. “And innovation is not a term you associate with the federal government.”

By the time the Apollo program ended in 1972, the excitement of the space race had already subsided and NASA saw their share of the federal budget slowly begin to shrink with every passing year.

Once the Space Shuttle program came to a close in 2011, NASA no longer had a means of achieving low Earth orbit, forcing them to look to the private sector to help subsidize launches and keep their ambitions on track.

“It seemed blindingly obvious that getting into low Earth orbit didn’t need to be a government exercise anymore because we had been doing it for 50 years, and the Russians had been doing it even longer than that,” said Ketcham. “It was something that could be turned over to the private sector, which invariably can do almost anything faster and cheaper than the government.”

Enter SpaceX. After successfully docking their Dragon Capsule to the ISS in mid-2012, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6-billion, 12-trip contract to resupply the installation on a regular basis. While this funding was undoubtedly crucial to the survival of SpaceX, the deal was also beneficial to NASA as well.

“SpaceX helped NASA in the very beginning by pushing for fixed-price contracts to enable the federal government to change how it does business,” Ketcham said. “[This let NASA] pay for milestones of achievement, as opposed to the traditional cost-plus model, which helped keep costs down and enabled the private sector to assume substantially greater risk and invest their own capital."

"So, NASA was a big beneficiary of the change in that paradigm. Concurrently, SpaceX was successful in landing NASA contracts that infused federal money into their initiative, so it was a win-win for both parties.”