Not cost plus only works if the task is well known and well defined. Because a task with an unknown or wandering scope (i.e. a science experiment) will eventually just stop once the money runs out, if it is not cost plus. Because individual companies are not bottom-less supplies of money either. So they'll mess up once, eat the cost. Mess up again, eat the cost. Repeat until the bank account says $0, and the rocket is half-complete. Then the company will simply go bankrupt. You can't go after a company with no money, there's nothing to go after. The government can take them to court and say "the contract says deliver a rocket, and you delivered 1/2 a rocket" all they want. But they won't get anything out of it ... because nothing exists anyways.

At this point, ISS resupply appears to be well known and well defined. However, if NASA, NFS, or the DOE said they wanted a new fusion power plant, and the RFP said fixed-fee (not cost plus), I doubt they would get any bidders. Or the bids would include absurdly high prices to allow for massive budget margins.

To be fair, Ares I was intended to put 56,000 lb into LEO. While Falcon 9 only puts 23,000 to 29,000 lb into LEO. And Antares only puts 11,000 lb into LEO. And we all know that space does not scale linearly.

However, I applaud both their efforts. And I'm not sure you can ever consider government contracting in space as "private" in the sense that a private company might put out a RFP for silicon chip fab, and get back 10 aggressively competitive bids from other private companies. But, it's a step in the right direction. NASA can set quality and efficiency guidelines each year for ISS resupply. And then award the next year's (or batch's, etc) set of resupplies to whoever meets the guidelines best.

From an individual perspective, there's nothing wrong with rich parents paying for a child's expensive education. From a society / species perspective, what is wrong with it is that it may be an inefficient allocation of resources. Some child in poverty may actually be a better combination of genes upon which to bestow all those expenses of education. Given those expense of education, the poverty child may rise up to be some theoretical physics researcher. While given the same, the rich child may only rise up to be a middle-level accountant / bean counter. We can't know for sure. But we also can't know for sure that it would be the opposite - the rich child becoming a researcher. So, where does this notion of "it's my money, I'll spend it on my family as I please" come from? Well, it's a basic notion that people are free to do with their own earnings as they please. That people will be motivated efficiently in their own life, if they are rewarded efficiently. But once that crosses a generational boundary, does that efficient-reward, efficient-motivation begin to break down? I think there is evidence that it does to some degree. The stories of privileged youth benefiting from prior generations work and then squandering it themselves are well known. And the stories of unprivileged youth overcoming prior generations failures to flourish are also well known. That both of these are known to exist are enough evidence to prove that parents exclusively funding a child's education is a flawed approach. So the balance must be somewhere in the middle.

Um, what if you need your part to be precisely 5 meters +/- 0.0005 m?

Actually, the worse the gravel road, the faster I go. It smooths out all the bumps. Once you hit 80 mph on a dirt road it feels like a freshly paved highway.

These are brand new lines that have just been laid down.

The first rule of Mormon is you do not talk about Mormon. Those 3% will be dealt with.

Judges rule on the "spirit of the law" all the time. This particular case would be difficult though since the IRS code uses very literal contract language.

Oh, you mean with an inferior university system, an inferior business environment, inferior access to the world's latest advanced technologies, and an inferior health care system? Because you tax everyone's incomes to death and provide so many governmental services, that people have less incentive to be productive and innovative? You can go ahead and keep your Nordic quality of life, thankyouverymuch.

P.S. The U.S. health care system is the best in the world. It's also the most expensive, but it's still the best. The WHO statistics for life expectancy don't account for risk factors. If you factor out homicides and vehicle deaths, we have the longest life expectancy in the modern world.

http://www.aei.org/books/bookID.859/book_detail.asp