Three years back, NASA had begun partnering with various companies who had showed interest in developing space taxis. NASA still wants to pursue its aim with full determination on a program, despite budget concerns, to fly its astronauts with commercial spaceships as reported by Reuters.
During the previous years, the Congress had reduced the Obama administration’s requested budget for the program by almost 50 percent. For the 2014 fiscal year, the administration had requested an $821 million.
The U.S Space agency had united its efforts with Boeing Co and SpaceX that of which are both developing a seven sitter capsules. NASA has also been assisting Sierra Nevada Corp. in developing a winged spaceship called Dream chaser.
NASA’s Director of commercial spaceflight development, Phil McAlister, told on an advisory meeting that ‘The biggest risk to the program is prematurely eliminating competition”. And he further added “The goal of the Commercial Crew program is safe, reliable and cost-effective human transportation to low-Earth orbit. Competition gives you a good price, but the partners know that safety and reliability are important criteria for NASA so they are battling to be the safest, to be the most reliable and to be the most cost-effective."
NASA’s space taxi pioneers are only paid in preset amounts and of which shall only be gained once they have pulled-off the aimed technical milestone. In addition, they have been also required to contribute to development costs.
The initiative projected to give NASA a $100 billion research complex by 2017, which shall give the agency an alternative in sending their astronauts to the international space station that orbits the planet 250 miles above.
Since the 2011 retirement of the US space shuttles, NASA had been dependently paying Russia more than $62 per seat to fly their transport station crews. In view of this, the space agency had created partnerships similar with Orbital Sciences Corp and SpaceX for cargo station transports, a service which had been beforehand was provided by the government operated and owned space shuttles.
McAllister even further revealed “the United States now has two low-cost launch vehicles, two autonomous spacecraft capable of delivering cargo and two privately developed launch facilities. This will give us a very robust U.S. domestic cargo transportation capability for an $800 million investment.”
Profitably, SpaceX had commercially sold its Falcon 9 rockets, on its manifest 50 missions, to include NASA’s 10 station cargo resupply flights.
A meeting shall be held at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday and Friday, by Companies competing to pioneer space transports for NASA had been set, to gain more insight about the program’s next plan.
