Does Mark Whittington want to name names, or provide credible examples from serious people?

This may annoy some people who, on the one hand, preach libertarian cant and, on the other hand, demand government pay money up front, before the promised hardware is even built, not to mention delivered.

Most "libertarians" that I know have been demanding that the government only pay for progress, when achieved. Mark's straw man notion has in fact been the standard government approach with the big contractors for years, with dismal results.

That was one of the things that bugged me about Griffin's talk: who are these companies that idiotically asking for money up front? I know in the past the 'community' (not the industry) has suffered greatly from "give me 100 billion dollars and I'll build you a moon base"-ism, but I don't know of anyone that's reallistically asking for that. Was there a single company at Space Access advocating something like that? I certainly don't recall any.

For one, t/Space:

http://www.space.com/spacenews/businessmonday_050509.html

t/Space is not asking for the full $400M up front. In this paper

http://transformspace.com/document_library/media/tSpace_TwoPager.pdf

they say, "Each fixed-price milestone payment is released only after successful completion of a hardware or flight test event."

So if they fail to reach a given milestone, they lose the contract and NASA pays no more and, I assume, gains all the technology developed up to that point.

Griffin's proposal sounded to me to be very close to what t/Space has been advocating.

Note that t/Space, or at least one of its participants, will have some significant capital investment of its own involved. According to Muncy's comments at ISDC and on the SpaceShow, Rutan is developing a carrier that will work for both the SS2 and the CXV.

- Clark

Isn't one of the t/Space obstacles a dispute over ownership of the intellectual property?

Mark wants to eat his cake and have it, too. He repeatedly claimed (even after being repeatedly corrected) that the Administration was committed to purchasing all manned and unmanned transportation to LEO from the private sector -- not just the small portion that Griffin's talking about now. Yet, he also praised the Aldridge Commission, which thought human spaceflight should "remain the province of government" and he's forever complaining about evil "libertarians" who want the Administration to actually do what Mark said it would do. He implies that anyone who does not "support the President's Vision" is anti-GOP and anti-space, yet he seems to be a worshipper of John F. Kennedy and his vision leaves space almost entirely in the hands of NASA employees whose union supported John Kerry in the last election.

Perhaps Griffin's speech is part of his negotiation with t/Space over questions like "what milestones" will be established and "who owns the design work."

Even if Griffin deeply craves deployment of a t/Space launch system he'd be a fool to admit it at a public breakfast and Michael Griffin is nobody's fool.