SpaceX Responds to Lexington Article

Last Month I wrote about a controversial article published on the Lexington Institute web site slamming SpaceX.

The article was written by Loren Thompson, who admits that he writes these analyses to represent his aerospace clients, such as Lockheed-Martin.

The Forbes web site has posted a rebuttal by SpaceX Vice President of Communications Robert Block that calls Thompson's article "distortions, innuendo and outright lies."

... Thompson claims SpaceX is busting its budget. This is completely untrue. Commercial providers only get paid a fixed sum of money when they meet performance-based milestones. By contrast, the Orion capsule, made by Thompson’s benefactors at Lockheed Martin, has already cost upwards of $5 billion, and is still many years and billions of dollars from completion. Compare that to the mere $300 million that NASA has spent to get the Dragon test flight on the Falcon 9 last December.