What's wrong in COTS (and HOW to do it BETTER)

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COTS actually IS a good idea and a revolution of the past NASA policy about space hardware contractors, but the practical application of COTS is VERY BAD and FLAWED in several points

that since to-day's COTS is just a DUPLICATION (of research, efforts and vehicles) with ready (or soon) available (or old) things rather than the development of NEW things

my opinion about "What's wrong in COTS" (and HOW to do it BETTER) is explained in this new ghostNASA article:

http://www.ghostnasa.com/posts/020wrongcots.html

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I actually agree with you on this.

It should have been structured like the bigelow prize. Money for demonstration and more contracts after that.

Something like $20 million per person delivered with $10 mil per ton of supplies. With a starter promise of $50 mil for orbiting and returning safely twice.

Still though, you would lend a lot more credibility to your arguments if you didn't write words in all caps and garish colors.

QFT

agreed, lose the all caps and garish colours. sort of agree with u also

I agree with most of what you say but I think companies should still have to provide some of the finance themselves.

The reason for this is that whatever they are building needs to be financially viable and robust enough to survive on its own once a NASA contract has finished, if NASA pays all the bills where is the proof of this. NASA has not shown that it is able to distinguish between what is viable and what is not when you look back at all its past failed and cancelled projects. Let the market be the arbitor.

Where NASA could help is by definitely providing follow on contracts once a system has been proven and I agree that COTS would benefit greatly from having more money and a wider range of projects but I guess that this is a bit of an experiment for NASA so I cant see that happening.

Please loose all the highlighting and colours it makes your articles look like they were written by a 10 year old.

that puts dozens (possible) good projects out of the game

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Its not possible to fund everything and if it is a good enough project it should be able to attract finance from elsewhere. I'd rather see funding concentrate on 6 to 10 good projects than spread thinly across a lot more.

What you are advocating is repeating what NASA is already doing on a larger scale what I think would be better is spend money wisely in a few select places so that it has the best chance of bearing fruit. A few well funded projects is better than a lot of badly funded ones and increasing COTS money to a point where NASA could adequately fund dozens is unrealistic and not going to happen.

It could be reasonably expected that each of those projects would be more efficient than if Nasa ran them themselves.

Even if it cost more to out source it all, it would be better economically to have such a grouping of companies providing generic services. They would be able to turn around and offer the services to other players where Nasa is prohibited from doing so.