From The Archive: Innovation

Cancelling it was absolutely the right move. We should have started Commercial Heavy Lift twenty years ago, and Ares II should’ve been canned before it even flew in the first place. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the government has no business building rockets. This isn’t Apollo where we’re having to invent everything from scratch—the engineering has been solved for fifty years. What we need right now is rapid, responsive innovation, not a bunch of red tape and bureaucracy.

Look at Commercial Cargo. Firm, fixed-price contracts handed off to small, agile companies that can afford to move fast and break things. You’re never going to get that kind of performance out of traditional contracting. And what did it give us? Two redundant launch vehicles and two redundant cargo ships to the space station. Hell, look at Commercial Crew. You can say what you want about SNC, but they got it done—what are we at, Phantom 9, 10 right now? And they did that even with NASA breathing down their necks every step of the way. And—look, don’t write this down, alright? But I know guys who were on that team through Phantom 4. All that bull about needing more oversight—stifling is what it is. All I’ll say is, if they had been allowed to do integrated testing their way, not the old way—are you still—? Look, off the record, alright? Forget I said it.

Anyway, point is, the industry is absolutely mature enough to build their own rockets now. And they do it faster, better, at a fraction of the cost, and pioneering new technologies the government wouldn’t have the guts to invest in. Forget refurbishment, we all know that was a lie. You want real reuse? Look at what SpaceX is doing with Falcon Superheavy. They’ll fly those things ten times each, just you wait. Not even ULA is brave enough to try something like that, but that’s what it takes to be competitive. That’s what real innovation is.

-Mark Mendelson, CTO, Venera Space