Can you elaborate? I used to work in the space industry, but it's been some time.

I spent some time at Orbital at a time when they were trying to launch ORBCOMM. What they were doing seems similar in feel to SpaceX. I also noted that ORBCOMM is one of the first scheduled launches for SpaceX.

Interestingly, Orbital was started by an entrepreneur with a vision of small launch vehicles and he managed to actually pull it off- it was not some huge spinoff of an existing giant. I wonder how much the two are talking.

Friends of mine who worked on the early days of Orbital's Pegasus described a situation that sounded very startup-like to me. (I worked there in the late 90's, but on Hubble, not Orbital's commercial projects).

Orbital had modest success (if an IPO can be considered modest). So it seems not only plausible, but likely that a new approach is what is needed here. Perhaps SpaceX is the next iteration of a leaner approach that will actually scale to the meet the grand vision.

In the quickest summary, SpaceX is structuring their business in such a way as to grow fast, get profitable, and remove the need for external funding. They are using COTS (government funding) in much the same way as a silicon valley company would use a VC to provide capital needed for rapid growth. They've been using that money coming in the door to create a non-government market and to make their technology very cost effective in order to grow the space market. Orbital has structured their COTS approach in such a way that they will be able to meet objectives and stay profitable, but it is not an evolutionary path towards a general space architecture.