OK, maybe not lies. Maybe he’s just so completely clueless that he doesn’t know that SpaceX has received less than three hundred million dollars from NASA. The rant starts off with absurdity:

This week’s Bloomberg Businessweek contains the latest adulatory media profile of Elon Musk, the California entrepreneur who is said to be shaking up the space-launch industry. As usual, the profile is long on Musk’s opinions and short on any details about how his space business is actually performing. Good thing for Musk, because so far his inspiring rhetoric about making access to space cheap and easy just isn’t panning out in real life. In fact, compared with the performance of his Space Exploration Technologies Corporation — popularly known as SpaceX — the traditional launch providers he regularly derides seem like paradigms of efficiency.

Note that he provides no data with which to demonstrate the “efficiency” of the traditional launch providers, which helped NASA spend over ten billion of the taxpayers’ money on Ares and Orion with nothing to show but a single giant bottle rocket test, and a half-completed capsule. He goes on with the typical mindless SpaceX bashing:

Musk’s track record to date is not encouraging. Consider:

— The initial launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 1 vehicle was delayed over two years, and then suffered three failures before finally achieving a successful launch five years late.

— The initial launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 5 vehicle was originally expected to occur in 2005, and never happened at all.

— The initial launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 vehicle was delayed three years, and the company is now trying to back out of price commitments it made.

Nobody ever said that getting into space would be easy, but when a company has suffered three catastrophic launch failures in a mere seven missions, that’s not a good sign.

Yes, three “failures” constituted a test program. The first three flights failed, with each flight getting closer to success as bugs were fixed, and the final two flights were successful.

As for Falcon 5, it never happened at all because they decided to switch their efforts to the Falcon 9, so I don’t understand the point of this. Other than, of course, to try to put the company in the worst possible light.

And what is he talking about, as far as “backing out of price commitments”? He doesn’t say. Likely because he’s making it up.

And of course, let me rewrite that last sentence: When a company has a steadily improving record, with the successful development of one operational rocket after three test flights, and the successful development of a much larger rocket, that has had two successful flights, with no failures, the second of which delivered a pressurized capsule that was successfully and flawlessly recovered on its first flight, all at a cost to the taxpayers of less than three percent of that expended on Constellation to date, that is the sign of a company that is maturing rapidly and high on the learning curve. He doesn’t note the order of the failures and successes, or that they involved two different rockets, because it doesn’t play into his false implication that the failures are random events, and that the next vehicle has a three in seven chance of failing.

The next line, though, takes the cake for mendacity:

Nonetheless, NASA can’t seem to get enough of SpaceX, shelling out $2 billion to get its launch vehicles to a point where they can begin lifting payloads into orbit to support the Space Station and other missions.

As noted above, SpaceX has received less than three hundred million dollars from NASA to date. It has a contract with a theoretical value of $1.6B, but it doesn’t get paid that until it actually starts delivering cargo to the ISS, at which point it will be doing it for far less than the Shuttle was costing NASA.

It’s interesting to note that Musk and his investors have only put about one-tenth of that amount into SpaceX, even though they present the company as an entrepreneurial, market-driven undertaking.

Even if the numbers were right, this is absurd. He is complaining because the revenue generated by a product or service is much larger than the original investment? Yes, it is interesting, but not for the reason he thinks. It’s interesting because it demonstrates what a great investment it is, while offering a better cheaper new service to a customer who needs it. This is how real businesses work, though probably Dr. Thompson doesn’t understand that kind of business, having spent so much of his career in the traditional space industry, where companies are reimbursed for labor and material, not paid for performance.

I hesitate to ask you to read the whole thing, because it’s so outrageous.

[Update a few minutes later]

Oh, the irony:

The Lexington Institute of Arlington, VA is a libertarian, free market think tank, founded in 1988 by Merrick Carey with help from Robert L. Severns of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution.[1] Its annual revenue is roughly $2.5 million, having received funding from corporate sponsors.

I wonder who some of those “corporate sponsors” might be? This might be a hint:

Loren B. Thompson argued in favor of continued C-17 production in 2009 and against this production in 2010.[10] He has also said that the United States is likely to engage in war against Vietnam again and so needs the EFV to storm their beaches.[11] He has also called for a shift in American defense spending towards items such as the Littoral Combat Ship and the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II that can be exported to allies.[12] Thompson has said that “The United States cannot continue to spend, especially on defense, the way it has been over the past decade.”[13]

I’m guessing that he’s a Lockmart flack, though he may be getting Boeing money as well. But the notion that this has anything to do with free markets, or libertarianism, is ludicrous.

[Update a few minutes later]

Space News (I think this is Warren Ferster) isn’t impressed, either.

Paul Spudis expresses his own concerns about the space debate, and defends Gene Cernan. Included in his piece, though, he inadvertently describes exactly why it’s hard to take Cernan seriously:

What did Cernan actually say? He has doubts about many of the claims made regarding “New Space,” specifically claims in the press about costs, schedule and capabilities. Cernan’s point is that it’s easy to design paper rockets and make hyperbolic claims about “new approaches” but in the business of space, things don’t always work as expected. Cernan also questions what markets will support commercial space (much of the focus is on NASA contracting with New Space companies to service the ISS with cargo and crew) and even questions the designation “commercial,” both on the grounds of the aforementioned non-existing markets and the reliance of some commercial space companies on NASA funding to develop their product.

If that is Cernan’s point, then he’s making it from some other planet. On this one, the “commercial” (whatever one means by that) companies don’t have paper rockets, but real ones. The Atlas Vs and Delta IVs that reliably launch defense satellites, and have been for years, are not “paper rockets.” Was it a “paper rocket” that put the Dragon into orbit in December? Was the Dragon a “paper capsule”?

Beyond that, Cernan doesn’t just “question” the markets, he completely ignores their existence. Bob Bigelow, who recently expanded his manufacturing plant in Las Vegas to build his own space facilities that only await completion of a means to reach them before he launches them, isn’t a market? Of course, Paul does the same thing:

New Space companies claim that they are commercial enterprises developing new space vehicles. If they are truly commercial, what markets do they serve? NASA is a government agency and has contracted for products and services from its beginning. A commercial company takes money from investors and sells a product or provides a service for profit. Commercial companies have access to NASA technology, so why do they also require and receive government subsidies?

Is he saying that SpaceX hasn’t taken money from investors? Because it has. That’s how it got started. Is he saying that they haven’t sold a product or provide a service for a profit? Because external audits by independent accounts indicate that they have, for several years running. And what’s with the word “subsidies”? Does he understand the meaning of that word? SpaceX (and OSC, and Boeing, and others) has provided a service or product (in the form of performance milestones) to the government in return for a fixed fee. In what way is that a “subsidy”? And even if it is, it’s not like it’s unprecedented. The airmail purchases of the governments played a key role in getting the early airline industry off the ground, both figuratively and literally. Even to this day the Civil Reserve Air Fleet underwrites some of the cost of the airline industry to ensure its availability for national needs (e.g. a surge of transportation required for a war, as happened in Desert Storm).

But some of this confusion can be allayed by thinking of it not in terms of “commercial” or not, but simply the nature of the contract. Traditionally, NASA has done things with cost-plus contracts, which result, eventually (assuming that it doesn’t get canceled first) in the product being delivered, but at horrifically high costs to the taxpayer (Constellation being an example of this, with the added disaster of it being sole-source no-bid, which compounded the problems from a lack of competition from the very beginning).

What is being proposed in the new paradigm is a) fixed-price contracts for defined milestones and b) multiple providers, creating on-going competition to drive down prices. And the notion that this will be beyond NASA oversight, as Captain Cernan seems to imagine (for no reason I can fathom other than that he has been paying no attention whatsoever to what has been going on), is ludicrous. If anything, the potentially undue amount of NASA oversight is putting a pall over the program right now, and if it fails, at least in its goal to reduce costs, this will be the most likely reason.

So if people are having trouble discussing this, it’s not because people are looking at the same set of facts, and coming to different conclusions. It’s that some people are completely oblivious to facts, and seem to be operating from false headlines and bombast from pork defenders on the Hill and industry, instead of reality.