That's one thing I don't get. There is a lot of celebration of the shiny new totally private space programs and all, but wasn't the majority of "heavy lifting" always done by private companies like Lockheed and Boeing? Isn't it mostly business as usual, just with a couple of new players in mostly the same game?
The game isn't mostly the same, look at the commercial crew program, Starliner failed in its first demo mission, now Boeing needs to pay for another demo-1 mission from their own pocket (they won't get any extra money for the second demo-1 mission); in the past NASA would have paid for another demo-1 mission.
in other words, they simply got their shit together (making the contractor liable for the actual outcome), plus a couple of new competitors, otherwise things are still ordered by, and directed by the same agencies, no?
Before Congress said let’s buy a suit for a wedding. There was only really one tailor.
Tailor says how much have you got.
Congress says $1 billion but that’s all I’ve got so not a dollar more.
Tailor says ‘sure I can make that work’...
Fast forward, suit is half way done, wedding is tomorrow, tailor says ‘It’s gonna cost your another billion’ or you get nothing. Congress pays and hopes the wife won’t notice. This happens over and over again.
Fast forward to 2020. Finally there’s more than one tailor. Several in fact. The suits are already made and bought off the rack and simply adjusted to fit.
Now congress gets to go shopping and has a range of suits to choose from. Original tailor is in deep shit.
Instead is spending billions on a suit and waiting forever, they pop down to ZOZO and pick one out and pay $100m. What a bargain I’ll take ten.
New tailors in this case - SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Blue Origin in this case.
No, they no longer micro manage the process and tell the contractor how to design the rocket or what processes to use. They provide overall specifications and let the contractor decide how to design the rocket. These days the various agencies just verify / do due diligence rather than design and project management.
Well, yes. The one big change is moving from cost+ contracts to fixed price ones.
Note that doing this is much harder than it sounds, because NASA does not get to decide what kinds of contracts they sign. This is decided by congress, who is still saddling NASA with billion+ dollar cost+ contracts on the SLS rocket.
There are no private space programs, there are private rockets developed using a combination of private funds and fixed cost contracts which means they are cheap. Old space rockets were developed only for gov contracts and they gouged the price as much as possible. SpaceX is efficient with it's rocket development.
