With a spacecraft in trouble and the White House watching, SpaceX had to deliver
Within minutes of liftoff, it was clear the Dragon spacecraft was in trouble.
Inside mission control on the morning of March 1, 2013, the SpaceX team was desperately trying to figure out what went wrong and soon pinpointed the problem: A few valves were stuck.
Lori Garver, NASA's deputy administrator, was beside herself. The Obama administration had placed a bold bet on Elon Musk's SpaceX, awarding it hundreds of millions of dollars on contracts to fly cargo to the International Space Station, despite the critics who said it was foolish to trust a private outfit with such a complicated endeavor.
This was a fundamental shift for NASA, a move that some in the agency's highest reaches were wary of, and a risky bet by the White House. Under President Obama, NASA had retired the space shuttle and hired contractors — SpaceX and Boeing — to fly missions to the International Space Station as if they were providing a taxi service to space. That, in turn, would allow NASA to focus on missions in deep space and recapture some of the glory that had faded in the decades since the Apollo era put 12 men on the moon.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-spacex-trouble-book-20180316-story.html