[nkoren]

I will never forget seeing a Lockheed Martin presentation about their bid for the X-33 contract. They had a slide titled "technical features", which looked roughly like this:

  * Linear aerospike engine
  * Conformal carbon-composite LH2 tanks
  * Integrated metallic TPS
  * Subcontractors in 38 states and 122 congressional districts

As far as I was concerned, the rest of the programme was a foregone conclusion from that point forward. Lockheed Martin of course won the bid -- the other bidders, with much simpler and more technically sound proposals that weren't driven by the need to split the project across as many districts as possible, of course lost -- and spent $1.3B without putting a single piece of hardware in the air.

The shuttle was a similarly foregone conclusion with a lot more money behind it. You're absolutely right that one of SpaceX's primary innovations, thus far, has simply been to not let politics get anywhere near the engineering process.

[Daniel_Newby]

Indeed. The bitterest thing is that cheap access to space would have flowed forth a river of money to tech companies in every voting district. They could have sold uncancellable payloads like it was going out of style, and instead they crucified themselves on a single doomed political game.