SFS News: Rocketplane Kistler protest NASA’s COTS decision

It was announced that NASA had informed Congress it was terminating its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) agreement with Rocketplane Kistler (RpK) because the company had failed to meet financial milestones. RpK sent a letter to NASA to protest the decision.

On September 7th, 2007 NASA issued a default letter warning that it would terminate the COTS agreement with RpK in 30 days as the firm had failed to raise private funding to complete the K-1 launch vehicle by the July 31, 2007 deadline.

The Oklahoma City-based firm was one of two companies NASA selected in August 2006 to split $500 million in public funds to help build and demonstrate competing launch systems capable of delivering cargo to the International Space Station.

RpK however are protesting the decision, having sent a seven page letter to Horowitz in the latter part of last month. The letter cites actions made by NASA during Phase 1 of COTS as detrimental to RpK’s efforts to secure investor revenue, ultimately leading to their failure to complete two COTS milestones.

In the letter RpK cite that they felt the decision not to include any ISS servicing in Phase 1 of COTS was a major omission from a financing standpoint.

“Input from potential investors, our investment bankers and strategic partners strongly confirms that failure to include a servicing component creates significant risks for any investorâ€

I am not surprised at all. Kistler has been dragging its feet for years. I have yet to see any photos of any hardware that they claim they have built.

And about these photo's:
http://spacefellowship.com/Forum/viewto ... 6183#26183

That's the first time I have ever seen do those photos. But for all the years they have been in business and the money they have spent you would think that they would have more of the launch vehicle completed. They have claimed for the past 5-6 years that the K-1 is "75% complete". Those photos do not indicate that they are anywhere that close to be being completed. Here's an article from over four years ago when Kistler filed for bankruptcy.


This information about the K-1 being 75% compete had been removed from their website quite some time ago.

Here's another article from a few days ago.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/ ... source=rss

Even though that is true, that is, from my point of view, not the reason why the investors pulled their money.

The fact is that they did managed to find money (surprisingly enough), but NASA themself put a stop to the willingness of the investors. No one wants to invest that kind of money if they think it is likely that they will get them back in some form.

Yeah. they did find the money.
I think the tone of the letter is suggesting that the funding was inhibited by NASA. NASA's commitment + decisions were a massive factor in funding issues with RpK.

75% complete? I wonder how did they came up with that one?
Maybe something like this?

K-1 development cycle:
1. prepare a cool looking design, not very realistic, but we will take care of the details later.
2. make some catchy powerpoint presentations about this.
3. make some even more catchy images and animations.
4. well, build that damn hardware everybody is asking about.

And suddenly... Hoorray, we have 75% of the first K1.

Sorry for being cruel, but I just have a bad day or something.