

NASA to pay commercial firms to launch astronauts? - petewarden
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8321353.stm

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lupin_sansei
I've been keenly following SpaceX for a while. They look set to get the
contract to ferry crew to the ISS <http://www.spacex.com/>

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pmorici
I'd be interested to know if any of these "experts" on this panel have ever
worked for or hold any financial interest in companies that are likely to get
the contacts.

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taitems
Having just saw the indie flick "Moon" the other night, this scares me. Not
from the humanitarian literal sense, but more so what corners a corporation
may be willing to cut and safety measures forgone in order to minimise costs.

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gaius
Every part on the Space Shuttle is built by the lowest bidder already, same as
in every large government procurement programme. Why do you think they keep
having to scrub launches because something as small as an o-ring fails? How
much does an o-ring cost compared to the cost of rescheduling a launch? It's a
complete false economy to work like that, and only a government can really get
away with it.

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dantheman
The o-ring failure had nothing to due with quality of the part. It had to do
with politics, the engineers said that the part had never been tested under
the conditions and recommended scrubbing the launch. I think Edward Tufte has
gone into detailed analysis about how the engineers presented their case
poorly.

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known
<http://www.scaled.com/news/index.html> has been doing this since 2003

