On Thu, 9 Dec 2010 16:08:54 -0500, Jeff Findley
wrote:


I have to admit to being a sceptic that "cots" would lead to real
services being offered. I saw it as mostly "make work" pork project
likely to be cancelled before any real results were to be seen .

Considering the tiny amount of money NASA is spending on COTS ($500M
from 2006 through 2011 - cite below), I'd hardly call it pork.

http://www.nasa.gov/offices/c3po/about/c3po.html

Some sort of disconnect there, because SpaceX has a $1.6 billion
contract with NASA for a minimum of 20,000 kg. of cargo to the Space
Station and Orbital has a $1.9 billion contract.

http://www.universetoday.com/22757/s...pply-contract/

Maybe $500 million was just seed money for development?

They've only got 1200 employees,

It remains to be seen how many more employees they'll need when they
have to start building and launching 10 or more Falcon 9s a year. I
hope the company has a good plan for ramping up from essentially an
R&D organization into a full-scale operational service.

the first image shows the Dragon wirth its 3 red-white parachutes and at
some distance, there is another object falling with 2 or more white
parachutres. What is that ? Does Dragon end-up re-entry as two
survivable units ?

I'd guess those are the drogue parachutes.

Correct.

Either that or it's the nose
of the capsule, perhaps being recovered for post flight inspection.

The nose cone was jettisoned during launch.

Brian