Boeing, which will use its CST-100 Starliner capsule to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS, received its two flight orders in May 2015 and December 2015, while SpaceX notched its first one in November 2015.
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SpaceX was able to meet NASA’s standards for the latest award thanks to its Crew Dragon spacecraft, Falcon 9 rocket, and related ground systems.
This brings to four the total number of planned launches carrying astronauts to the ISS under the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) program. On Friday, NASA announced a second crew mission with the private space company after they completed several developmental milestones.
Restoring human spaceflight launch capabilities for the United States is a major effort being managed by NASA-direct flights from Florida’s Space Coast to the International Space Station (ISS) will enable USA crews to devote more of their valuable time to research-these projects are involved in formulating the necessary steps for deep space missions, including a U.S. journey mission to Mars. The studies are conducted with a potential manned mission to Mars in mind, the red planet our closest neighbor at some 34 million miles away at its closest point to Earth. The launch pad is expected to be used for crew delivery missions to the ISS in the future.
It has been reported that the two parties have agreed to exchange data that would ultimately lead to academic progress, and no further; NASA and SpaceX are not bound to exchange funds or the like.
SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell says the Crew Dragon is coming together quite nicely, and the qualification of their docking adapter is done.
The days of USA astronauts riding exclusively Russian vehicles to the International Space Station is drawing to an end.
As this moves forward, NASA is also getting commercial spaceflight companies to design and build more novel types of LEO habitation systems that can be built faster and with less resources. The US space agency has ordered them the second mission. SpaceX is now making four Crew Dragon spacecraft, two for qualification testing and two for flight tests in 2017.
According to a news release, in 1996, Scott Kelly and his twin brother, Mark Kelly, entered Astronaut Group 16 of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at Johnson Space Center. “Those contracts cover the development of commercial crew vehicles and include at least two, and as many as six, post-certification missions”.
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Another company has also been working on running commercial space flights, and they have a ship waiting in the wings for approval.
