LONDON: Two American spaceflight companies are quietly competing in a space race for the new era.
SpaceX and Boeing are vying to become the first private firms to fly astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA sometime in 2017. NASA chose both companies as part of the agency’s commercial crew program, which may effectively end NASA’s current sole reliance on Russian vehicles to get astronauts to and from the orbiting outpost.
NASA has purchased expensive seats for astronauts aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft since the end of the space shuttle program in 2011, but hitching rides on SpaceX’s manned Dragon capsule and Boeing’s CST-100 spacecraft could make spaceflight significantly cheaper for the space agency. Officials with both SpaceX and Boeing think seats on their launch systems will be cheaper than the approximately $70 million price tag of a ride on a Soyuz.
