One of the Obama Administration’s most duplicative and expensive examples of crony capitalism waste is NASA’s Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew programs. Companies that were supposed to cheaply deliver supplies and astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) under the false narrative of competition to curb costs, have blown up rockets yet only to be compensated for failing to deliver, are years behind schedule, destroyed taxpayer funded payloads without consequence and are twice as expensive as originally promised.
NASA began funding Commercial Cargo capsule development in 2006 to 2 providers. In 2008, before either company even flew and instead of downselecting to 1 company, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract for 12 launches and Orbital and $1.9 billion contract for 8 launches. In October 2014 and June 2015, respectively, both Orbital and SpaceX blew up a rockets delivering NASA hundreds of millions of dollars in critical NASA cargo, further delaying their already…
