Orbital Sciences - A Very Good Launch Vehicle, Right?

Phil McAlister, Director of Commercial Spaceflight at NASA, joins me to talk about the history of and lessons learned from the Commercial Cargo and Crew programs, what things went well and not so well in those programs, the difficulty of changing NASA’s approach to human spaceflight, how to deal with varying levels of Congressional funding and buy-in, and how all of that feeds into the new Commercial LEO Destinations program.

This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 39 executive producers—Simon, Lauren, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, The Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Hemant, Dawn Aerospace, and seven anonymous—and 716 other supporters.

Topics

• Philip McAlister, HEO Director of Commercial Spaceflight Division | NASA
• NASA Releases COTS Final Report | NASA
• International Space Station Commercial Resupply Launch | NASA
• Commercial Crew Program | NASA
• Low-Earth Orbit Economy | NASA
• NASA Selects Companies to Develop Commercial Destinations in Space | NASA
• NASA Developing a Plan to Fly Personnel on Suborbital Spacecraft | NASA
• Happy Hour - Off-Nominal
• Off-Nominal Happy Hour - Dec 16, 2021 - YouTube
• Main Engine Cut Off on Twitter: “If you haven’t yet caught Happy Hour, you should check it out! I shared some big news: Next week is my last week at my full-time job! I’m going independent so I can do more MECO, more @offnom, and hopefully some new projects too! Thank you all so much for being part of this. ❤️”

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• Music by Max Justus
• Artwork photo by NASA