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August 06, 2010
Friday
 
 
Boeing capsule press conference
Dale Amon (Belfast, Northern Ireland/Laramie, Wy)  Aerospace

Rand Simberg attended the Boeing press conference and has supplied some notes on their CST-100 plans.

I am glad to see there will be competition in the LEO cargo and business passenger field. As much as I like Elon and what he has accomplished, there is nothing like real competition to grow the market.

Comments

As Boeing said in their press release, the completion of this vehicle will be dependent on government contracts. How exactly is that "commercial"?


Posted by David at August 7, 2010 06:02 PM

In the same way that selling office supplies, airline tickets, automobiles and trucks to the government is commercial.

If the government designs a truck and has it built to DOD specifications and is the sole customer and the end product is of no use to anyone else, that is not commercial.

If a company builds a product or service and designs it so that it is priced and aimed at a wide market and also sells it to the government, even if the government sales are initially a significant percentage, that is still a commercial entity.

So Ares was non-commercial. No-one else had a use for it at the price and complexity of operation it represented. Falcon 9 or Atlas V, on the other hand, are designed with commercial customers in mind, and any self-respecting capitalist is going to maximize their ROI and minimize their risk by getting any customer they can, and if it is a venture with high risk, they are seriously going to want an anchor tenant to get their business case past the beancounters and through the shareholders... remember, we are in the age of Sarbanes-Oxley and constant litigation by scumbag lawyers against publicly traded companies.

You take what you can get. You only have two choices my friend: the status quo, which has lots of money and political power behind it, or a change in course which is highly unpopular to those politicians. Ain't no 3rd way.


Posted by Dale Amon at August 7, 2010 07:00 PM
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