While SpaceX might have gotten their Falcon 1 into orbit first by over a year, the back-to-back successes of the K-1 Risk Reduction Demo and the first of the K-1’s demonstration flights to station saw the Falcon family of rockets overshadowed for the next six months. This kerosene-fueled tug of war had proceeded for the last several years as both companies pushed vehicles into service. While each saw opponents in the spending on Shuttle-derived heavy lifters and in other companies elsewhere, after nearly a decade which had seen everything from legal challenges to competing for small sat contracts and build a contract book for Falcon 1 and K-1, each had a corporate culture which quietly believed that while Shuttle-derived lifters might be COTS’ current opposition, the COTS awards and flight testing to date almost boiled down to keeping your friends close but your enemies closer. By their logic, Kistler had monopolized venture capital in spaceflight for years, sinking it into an enormous development budget (nearly as much as had been spent on all of Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Dragon) to fund a vast army of subcontractors that had, at long last, barely succeeded in producing a single flying vehicle and yet were now as a merged company sinking yet more funding into the objective of a reusable suborbital spaceplane-one Elon and others at SpaceX saw as orthogonal to successful orbital reusable rockets. SpaceX, for their part, saw Rocketplane as representative of the traditional ways of doing business in spaceflight they were looking to disrupt. Elon was, like his firm, a loud, brash, arrogant upstart who had promised much but to date had delivered little, yet had demanded consideration as though his team’s methods might upend the industry and invalidate all the experience in the ways success had been found in the past. Kistler, the corporate predecessor to RpK, had been driven into its first bankruptcy by the revocation of their NASA-provided SLI contract after a SpaceX legal challenge, and viewed SpaceX in many of the same ways SpaceX was viewed by others in the traditional space sector.
RACE INTO SPACE ALTERNATE HISTORY PROFESSIONAL
On the internet and in professional contexts, the two COTS competitors had long harbored an intense rivalry.
Shuttle hardware is proven and quite reliable, why fix what’s not broken? I do hope DIRECT beats out SLS, but I still think it’ll encounter a lot of the issues faced in our timeline. Lastly it’s the “What to do with thousands of jobs and billions in Federal funding” question. I wish both K-1 and Falcon safe trips in the upcoming launch, and further on into the future. Through them ISS will continue to have supplies carried by reusable rockets after Shuttle is retired (knock on wood). Meanwhile RpK has taken an early lead against Hawthorne and NASA. Not sure if they’re planning on dumping them in the ocean like Shuttle SRBs, or if they’re cooking up a giant Mr.
Parachute and ocean recovery for Falcon is.
Which is of course the question: What’s next? Things are starting to ramp up in the timeline! A kerosene fueled tug of war is taking shape between the entrenched legacy players and the jockeying of new commercial firms for the future of space.
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