NASA Chooses American Companies to Transport U.S. Astronauts to International Space Station

U.S. astronauts once again will travel to and from the International Space Station from the United States on American spacecraft under groundbreaking contracts NASA announced Tuesday. The agency unveiled its selection of Boeing and SpaceX to transport U.S. crews to and from the space station using their CST-100 and Crew Dragon spacecraft, respectively, with a goal of ending the nation’s sole reliance on Russia in 2017.

NASA Chooses American Companies to Transport U.S. Astronauts to International Space Station

About time!

Dollar for dollar nothing has made as good an investment in government spending as our space program. If we can lead the development of private companies for space exploration it is opening a new frontier for profits. We could see a boom in the economy bigger than any other is history! This comes at a time we sorely need good, high paying jobs back in our nation!

Too bad this is coming so late in Obama's term.

Seems like every time a new president takes over this all gets changed... but here's hoping for a new start and better future!

a reply to: pianopraze

Excellent...

I guess this is one good thing that has come out of Putin's craziness. Its about time the US puts its resources back into American companies.

As for the next president I doubt Putin is going anywhere anytime soon so to change course would make no sense.

I think there is already a thread on this, i could be wrong.

Something like this will no doubt provide an economic stimulation, but short of mining an asteroid, there is no profit in exploration - at least not a foreseeable one. It would take decades to go about finding something tangible enough to provide anyone with profit. This is where the privatization of space exploration gets dicey because NASA is inherently exploratory and while their projects are obscenely expensive, they are not founded on profit. It really doesn't matter now because our space capabilities are so infantile and in the early stages of a privatized space industry it will be beneficial, but in the long it only costs money to explore.

sigh...another money pit and possible death for many astronauts cause low budget materials for higher profits...

analise the JSF debacle.....

a reply to: pianopraze

It's about time. The sooner we commercialize space travel the better. We did the Moon thing, We've done the Space station thing and landed probes on Mars. While China plays catch up gloriously reproduces previously already accomplished Russian and American nationalistic human space flight and robotic achievements we should ratchet it up a notch and go for commercialized non Governmental Space tourism.


Beam me up Scotty

Will it really be a commercial enterprise or will it be paid for by taxpayer supplied grants to the companies?

I think the way commercial crew was run makes far more sense than how other nasa programs have been run.

frankly it saddens me that they had to downselect.. Dream chaser seemed to be quite promising, hopefully it still might be used.

SLS is eating up Nasa's modest budget, with a traditional cost-plus-reward contract, which while making sense for something like a SR-71 or a Space Shuttle, make no sense when the goal is to build a big-rocket.

Nasa's budget and more importantly how it spends it's budget is decided by congress, for whom SLS is a useful program to keep jobs in their respective districts.

a reply to: olaru12

Its taxpayer funded, but privately owned/operated..

the development was both publically funded by nasa, and privately funded by investors.

It runs actually in sort of a tradition.

During the 1920's and early 1930's, civil aviation experienced a great deal of advancement due to government air-mail contracts. Whereby factors like cargo-weight/volume and speed were encouraged. In addition to military contracts this led to advances in aviation technology.

really there wouldn't be a free market to space, because there simply isn't an economically viable reason to go to space without government. Whether that takes the form of using government-funded rocket designs (from Araine(europe), to Delta(USA), or Proton(Russia), or Long-March(China)), or getting other subsidies. The costs of developing, building, and maintaining infrastructure would simply cost too much at present.

a reply to: pianopraze

In 2017?

If Putin is "smart", which he isn't ... of course. He'd shut down the Program, right now ... this minute.