NASA Buying Private Companies' Suborbital Rocket Flights 60
FleaPlus writes "NASA is spending a total of $475,000, split between Masten Space Systems and John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace, for a series of seven test flights of the companies' reusable suborbital rockets over the next several months, going to altitudes as high as 25 miles. NASA's goal is to foster a more cost-effective and flexible way to conduct microgravity and upper-atmosphere research. Jeff Bezos's suborbital spaceflight company Blue Origin has also been making steady progress this year on their $3.7M contract to test pusher-escape system and composite pressure vessel technologies, which NASA is interested in for orbital spaceflight."
Good For Space Tourism (Score:4, Interesting)
Uh oh (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Pay per flight (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually cost effective? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Pay per flight (Score:4, Interesting)
The truely screwed up thing is: NASA only has the freedom to do this sort of thing with "scraps" - all the "real money" is earmarked, with congress saying "build this project using these contractors". NASA has become a project management/procurement organization, which is sad in its own right, but they're not even allowed to do that correctly.