SpaceX has received its first mission order from NASA to fly astronauts to the International Space Station in 2017:
This is the second in a series of four guaranteed orders NASA will make under the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contracts. The Boeing Company of Houston received its first crew mission order in May.
"It's really exciting to see SpaceX and Boeing with hardware in flow for their first crew rotation missions," said Kathy Lueders, manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program. "It is important to have at least two healthy and robust capabilities from U.S. companies to deliver crew and critical scientific experiments from American soil to the space station throughout its lifespan."
Determination of which company will fly its mission to the station first will be made at a later time. The contracts call for orders to take place prior to certification to support the lead time necessary for missions in late 2017, provided the contractors meet readiness conditions.
[More after the break.]
Commercial crew missions to the space station, on the Boeing CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, will restore America's human spaceflight capabilities and increase the amount of time dedicated to scientific research aboard the orbiting laboratory.
SpaceX's crew transportation system, including the Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, has advanced through several development and certification phases. The company recently performed a critical design review, which demonstrated the transportation system has reached a sufficient level of design maturity to work toward fabrication, assembly, integration and test activities.
"The authority to proceed with Dragon's first operational crew mission is a significant milestone in the Commercial Crew Program and a great source of pride for the entire SpaceX team," said Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of SpaceX. "When Crew Dragon takes NASA astronauts to the space station in 2017, they will be riding in one of the safest, most reliable spacecraft ever flown. We're honored to be developing this capability for NASA and our country."
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday November 24 2015, @03:57AM
Yes they are still selling to a single customer but we are slowly inching our way into commercial exploitation of space independent of NASA and it's politics. It will probably be decades before we see a crewed mission that doesn't have a NASA logo anywhere on the hull but we still have a chance of getting off this ball of dirt before some idiot kills everybody.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday November 24 2015, @04:02AM
NASA is a pretty effective stimulus program for SpaceX. NASA will likely have plenty of satellite and other launches in the coming decades, and now manned missions have been added to the list. Musk and his engineers will be innovating with those hundreds of millions, and Boeing + others will follow. It looks like one of the other companies may even get to partially/fully reusable rockets before SpaceX.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Funny) by aristarchus on Tuesday November 24 2015, @07:18AM
Yes! jmorris has finally put it all on the line! Damn NASA and its "politics"! Can you imagine the gall of this "government" agency using our tax dollars to do things like explore space? I mean, what benefit do I get from that! And insisting on things like climate change, when every reputable right-wing conspiracy blog (looking at you, Brietbart!, or Rupert! or, well, a bunch more) just knows that Global Warming is something that their bosses have told them to put out the message that it is not real, about. We should have an opt-out box on the tax form, so we can only support science if we agree with it. And I really have to ask, is there anything in the spec for this mission, about, you know, the color of the shirts of the first astronauts to go up in a SpaceX? I was just worried that they might be red shirts. Cheaper, you know.