Comment by shasheene | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shasheene | Hacker News Reader

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To clarify the history:

SpaceX only entered the Commercial Crew Development [1] program by winning funding as part of CCDev 2 funding in April 2011, allowing it to develop the Dragon 2 launch abort system. They later won funding form both phases of CCiCap (Commercial Crew integrated Capability) funding in December 2012. (I believe that's in-flight abort testing etc).

The technical gains (especially reusable rockets) was moved along more by the help funding Falcon 9 initially through the commercial cargo development (COTS) and International Space Station resupply (CRS) contracts (which ensured the survival of SpaceX for a few more years). [2]

Commercial Cargo was actually a George W. Bush era policy - part of his 2004 plan [3], and the CRS contract was awarded before Obama was even inaugurated!

So far, Bush's Space Shuttle cancellation did more for SpaceX than Obama's Constellation Program cancellation (though that may changes once MCT/ICT is up and running and causes SLS to be potentially cancelled)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Crew_Development [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Orbital_Transportat... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_for_Space_Exploration

Spacex were pretty clear that they can't fund the full development/deployment of ITS (MCT) on their own. That's what the whole "stealing underpants / kickstarter" joke slide was about in the presentation.

They need public and/or private organisations to pre-purchase a lot of tickets to Mars before they can outright build it themselves, or they'd need to partner with the likes of NASA.

> They need public and/or private organisations to pre-purchase a lot of tickets to Mars before they can outright build it themselves, or they'd need to partner with the likes of NASA.

Musk said during the presentation that they're not going to pre-sell tickets to finance development and production (the way Virgin Galactic did).

I think you only read the first part of that sentence.

e:

I mean that there's two types of funding models.

NASA (or some other government's space agency) can put out a call for bids to provide a mission to Mars with certain capabilities (transport this many tons of cargo, this many people, having this characteristics) - then ULA, BO, SpaceX etc then work up bids for their various Mars capabilities to service that bid. SpaceX can go "We can do this using our Interplanetary Transport System".

This would be an ordinary commercial arrangement like the Commerical Crew and Commercial Cargo that NASA already does.

In theory some large enough company could do a similar thing. Like SpaceX / ULA do for Satellite launches today.

At the end of the mission after delivering the cargo/crew/etc SpaceX keeps the hardware, and can sell tickets to whoever else wants to go.

The other approach is that NASA comes along and wants SpaceX to build a system that meets certain capabilities but in a more integrated/directed fashion like was done between NASA and Boeing/Rockwell/etc for the space shuttle, but NASA owns the gear (since it was funding the development)

Both options end up with SpaceX building the ITS, but the way it's funded will determine who owns it at the end of the mission.

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