I shouldn't have to tell regular readers this, but not all who come here are regular readers. Clark Lindsey has a blow-by-blow of the COTS announcement, an RpK press release, and other info.

He does this stuff, so I don't have to.

[Update on Saturday morning]

Clark has another set of links, and an idiotic quote (are there any other kind?) from John Pike.

Does anyone thinnk the whole purpose of COTS is to
just leverage the Russians into selling Progress
cheaper?

COTS makes no sense for NASA.

STS is flying again, kind of.

CEV is being worked on.

ISS is scheduled to shutdown in 2012.

So what's COTS good for?

Investors put in money to get a contract that's good for
3 years?

"COTS makes no sense for NASA."

It makes the most sense of any program in 34 years.

"STS is flying again, kind of."

Which means, with 3 shuttles remaining, we are back to where we were in 1983. Whoopee.

"CEV is being worked on."

And, presuming it isn't lapped by Dragon, lessons learned from CEV will yield subsequent rounds of COTS-style projects for lunar transportation and architecture. LockBoe can never build a solar system economy, because they're not a real business--they're a military industrial eunuch surviving on cost-plus corporate socialism. What they do is only somewhat better than having everything done by NASA directly, so really their purpose is a midway transition point between bureaucratic and commercial.

"ISS is scheduled to shutdown in 2012."

ISS isn't scheduled to shut down at all. Current plans involve running it until 2016, but there's no requirement that NASA can't keep it going for longer if they wish.

"Investors put in money to get a contract that's good for 3 years?"

Both companies already planned to build these vehicles, have multiple commercial revenue streams envisioned for them, and now COTS is simply going to pay them for successful milestones along the way so that NASA has options for ISS resupply and crew transport. IMHO, the funding should have been six times as large and included every firm with a credible plan, not just those with the highest probability of success--THAT would have been exciting.

That COTS makes sense to you, I believe.

That COTS makes sense to NASA, I don't believe.
Not one iota. NASA exists as a jobs program for
unemployable PhD's and Engineers. That means,
NASA must constantly keep a large workforce going,
in key states. COTS must be efficient, lean,
that means COTS makes all NASA programs look bad.

I would be ecastatic if NASA were really trying to help
industry, but, it's just not their value system.
Bin Laden blows up buildings, NASA destroys
commercial space.

Also, the ISS has a 15 year design life. It's already half way through it's design life and it's got 2 years deferred
maintenance. Lot's of stuff never worked (The US Airlock),
lot's works badly (Russian O2 Generators).
When Mir got Old, it got really cranky.
Now ISS is getting old. Give it some time,
something will fail very badly.

"NASA exists as a jobs program for unemployable PhD's and Engineers."

A rather novel interpretation of the National Aeronautics and Space Act. I consider it the most important agency in the United States government, if not the world, although deprived for decades of the means to go about its mission. They've been beaten down by politicians, nibbled to death by accountants, and had their soul sucked dry by bureaucrats, but I remain hopeful they can be brought back to life.

"That means, NASA must constantly keep a large workforce going, in key states."

Yes, it has become rather a hostage to its own pork spending--but now there's a COTS office, which means there are bureaucrats whose jobs depend on the program succeeding and expanding. If we are all very lucky, the COTS office will some day account for most of NASA's budget.

"COTS must be efficient, lean,
that means COTS makes all NASA programs look bad."

That's why it's $500 million instead of several billion--enough to push commercial space along, not enough for the wolves to feel threatened and go on the attack. Griffin wants to bring the seeds of change in through the back door, lulling the sentinels into complacency with juicy CEV contracts, and then just let it grow under their noses until it's unstoppable.

"I would be ecastatic if NASA were really trying to help industry, but, it's just not their value system."

The point of COTS is to make it their value system, and Congress will be quite responsive if they see NASA operations costs could be decimated. No matter how protective a Senator or Congressman might be of their local SFC, there's no way they could stand in the way of that kind of savings to the taxpayers without being hammered from all sides. Advocacy groups, Newspace firms, taxpayer organizations, the GAO, colleagues from states that benefit from COTS, everyone but LockBoe and the SFCs would be against them.

"Now ISS is getting old. Give it some time,
something will fail very badly."

Good thing we've got Bigelow. By 2020, it wouldn't surprise me if he had something in orbit that made ISS look like a toy. Think long sausage links of modules, or fractal snowflakes branching outward on all three axes, or a ring of modules rotating for fractional g, or a really huge module that rotates about its long axis. Or all of the above.