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Transformational Space Corporation
(about page)
"Under our approach, government development contracts and incentives focus on top-level goals, with technology and operational choices left to the private sector. The government sets specific top-level needs, but the 'invisible hand' of market forces will shape choices as they flow down multiple supplier chains. Contracts and incentives will be structured so that several companies in each major area have an opportunity to win this support."
t/Space Crew Transfer Vehicle
Popular Science

Can a Small Start-up Build America's Next Spaceship?
Popular Science
"They proposed a radical idea to NASA: Use contracts that NASA was offering for mere paper studies on next-generation spaceships to instead build actual, working hardware. In Gump's plan, incremental progress toward a fully functional vehicle would be rewarded with additional funding, allowing the project to move forward... 'What we're proposing to NASA,' Gump said, 'is a type of incremental side bet' to the big aerospace effort to build America's next spaceship—that is, a scaled-down backup and supplement to the CEV. 'Every 6 to 12 months we have performed a set of hardware milestones, and NASA has had a chance to say, ‘Well, have you actually performed what you promised?' So they never are betting the entire amount of money.' The big aerospace effort to build the next- generation CEV, which will be led by either Lockheed Martin or the team of Northrop Grumman and Boeing, will have no such requirement. But t/Space won't compete with those companies for the contract to build NASA's primary space-launch system; it will just quietly build a backup machine more quickly and at a fraction of the cost. 'We are trying hard not to claim to be a space-shuttle replacement; we are a Soyuz replacement,' Gump said, 'a simple craft to ferry people up and back rather than a self-propelled space station like the shuttle.'"