NASA ordered five additional astronaut missions from SpaceX in a $1.4 billion contract.
Washington
NASA said Wednesday that SpaceX would fly five more manned flights to the International Space Station for the agency by the end of the decade under a $1.4 billion contract order, bringing the total number of contracted missions for the company’s Crew Dragon astronaut capsule to 14.
The other company with a similar crew transportation contract, Boeing (NYSE:BA), has not finished building its Starliner space capsule.
Related: NASA delayed the launch of the Artemis moon rocket owing to cooling issues.
A NASA statement said that the grant “allows NASA to maintain a continuous U.S. capacity for human access to the space station through 2030, with two different commercial crew industry partners.”
NASA gave SpaceX and Boeing contracts worth billions of dollars in 2014 to build, test, and regularly fly space capsules that can take people to and from the International Space Station, an orbiting research lab that has been home to international astronaut teams for decades.
Crew Dragon has flown five crewed flights for NASA since it was crew-certified in 2020, when SpaceX became the first commercial corporation to send humans into orbit and relaunched NASA’s human spaceflight programme following the 2011 retirement of the U.S. shuttle programme.
Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner capsule has problems with software and valves, but it still wants to send its first crew of astronauts into space in February of next year. This is a last test flight before NASA approves the spacecraft for regular astronaut flights.
NASA gave each company six human missions at first, but in early 2022, because Boeing was having technical problems, NASA gave SpaceX three more missions.
Related: On the eve of the launch of the Artemis mission, NASA’s mega-moon rocket is prepared for takeoff.
NASA ordered five additional astronaut missions from SpaceX in a $1.4 billion contract.
