Musk Corrects Wall Street Journal Article

Musk: "For crew transport, I would expect Boeing or Lockheed to win the bulk of the funding and hopefully we will be second."

Musk is circumspect here. But I wonder how the anti-incumbent crowd feel about it.

I'm confused. WSJ said that Musk conseads that $350M is too low for a launch escape system and that it would cost $1B. Musk says they're off by a factor of 10.

A factor of 10 low would be $100M but Musk apparently has said that's too low. So does he mean it will really be $10B to develop a launch escape system?

Didn't he say earlier that he expected Lockheed/Boeing would win the bulk of funding for the HLV?

Also, whatever happened to Orbital's Cygnus/Taurus? At least on paper they're far closer to Commercial Human Space than Lockheed/Boeing.

We just built and Pad-Abort tested a Launch Abort System. I suspect Elon could have it if he wanted. It would have to be re-sized, of course.

Cygnus is a cargo-only hauler and, unlike Dragon, does not have a re-entry vehicle. If they wanted to compete in the commercial crew launch market, they would need to replace the Cyngus's cargo hauler with a completely new crew-carrying re-entry vehicle. Unless they are doing something in secret, very little of their work on Cygnus would give them a short-cut on that work.

The work Lockheed have done on Orion have certainly given them their own head start on building a LEO crew taxi. Boeing is working with Bigelow on their own crew taxi and are starting with a crew-carrying RV, putting them ahead of Orbital too. So, both these companies are ahead of Orbital in the commercial crew stakes, assuming that Orbital are not working on something in secret.