iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Replies

Chase Million @millionconcepts.com · 04/09/2026

It's refreshing to hear this. Industry insiders keep asserting that everything is moving to firm-fixed. That would be (and has been!) a terrible mistake. Different contracting approaches have different tradeoffs, and make sense in different circumstances. Pick what makes sense for the job!

speculative. NASA, the taxpayers and the interested public should care about whatever achieves the intended mission outcome as quickly, affordably and safely as possible, and the contracting method is secondary. We can screw up cost-plus, fixed-price and as-a-service contracts just as easily. The outcomes are what matter. If, along the way,

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Chase Million @millionconcepts.com · 04/09/2026

Basically the things we can commercialize in space are those that require: (1) extreme altitude (e.g. in order to see or send signals long distances, and this market is oversaturated) (2) microgravity (and this market is both oversaturated and, in fact, micro) And that's the end of the list!

[5] There are absolutely areas where the commercial model works extraordinarily well. Launch, Earth observation and communications are real services supported by real markets, and have been for decades, where NASA truly can be one customer of many. There will be more examples in the years ahead. In those cases, NASA can execute

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Chase Million @millionconcepts.com · 04/09/2026

"It does not." This level of clarity and bluntness is really great to see.

6] People often point to commercial crew and cargo as proof that this model works everywhere. It does not. Those programs benefited from NASA providing substantial early demand across dozens of missions, creating an opportunity for private capital to generate a return, even though I believe most did not, while also allowing an iterative

data has demonstrated that. Even then, the development record across all of the crew and cargo providers was far from perfect. And today, the category leader is increasingly focused on opportunities with much larger potential markets, which should tell us something about the near-term economics of the market NASA helped create.

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