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.