NASA Unveils Commercial Crew Contract

[Wanderlust]

The U.S. space agency will purchase commercial spaceflights for astronauts as part of its Integrated Design Contract, which will award $1.61 billion to companies that successfully develop a complete spaceflight package — one that includes rockets, spaceships, launch services, ground and mission control operations, and spacecraft recovery after landing.

http://www.space.com/13012-nasa-unveils-private-space-taxi-contract.html

Yes yes yes!

 

[sojourner]

Sounds tailored to SpaceX.

Upon further reading, this is not good as phase 2 only selects one service provider. So much for developing a competitive market.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

It IS a competitive market. They're pretty much setting up a space race between SpaceX and ULA to see who can get their ship/rocket operational first.

The race boils down to this: ULA/Boeing has to complete development of the CST-100 and find a way to get the Atlas-V man-rated with a couple of test flights. SpaceX has to complete its launch abort system for the Dragon and get a few test flights out of the Falcon-9/Dragon Cargo to get both of them, also, fully man-rated.

As it stands now, ULA/Boeing is the bigger company with more experience, SpaceX is the dark horse with a substantial head start.

In the end, there can be only one.

 

[sojourner]

^Yea, the "only one" part is what sucks. no redundancy.

 

[Dukhat]

Also, SpaceDev is in the pack too with the development of their Dreamchaser mini-shuttle.

 

[sojourner]

^but definitely not near the front of the pack.