T/SPACE is finding the paperwork involved in performing a NASA contract too onerous:

“NASA wants 40 to 50 monthly reports on what you’re doing,” David Gump, president of the Transformational Space consortium told New Scientist on Monday. And while “we could build a great Crew Exploration Vehicle”, Gump says, the consortium cannot comply with the reports and studies NASA stipulates to monitor the project.

This is one of the reasons that space hardware costs so much. In order to perform a government contract, you have to bear the overhead of the contract specialists, accounting people, etc., above and beyond that necessary to just build the hardware. In addition, all of the status reports and reviews tend to chew up a lot of the time of the engineers and managers who are preparing them rather than doing engineering.

In theory, T/SPACE could hire the necessary additional staff in order to meet the contractual requirements, but it dramatically changes the corporate culture to do so. I can understand their reluctance. And as a result, it’s almost inevitable that the two CEV contracts will go to two of the usual suspects, with the usual high costs.

Thus shall it be until we develop a robust commercial space industry.

[Evening update]

Keith Cowing has a different take on it:

Yawn. When the going gets tough, blame it all on paperwork.