HARROW: Staying true to a corporate philosophy that favors high-visibility flight tests, SpaceX plans to continue wringing out major parts of the company’s human-rated Dragon spaceship in a sequence of dramatic flights leading up to the capsule’s first crewed mission scheduled for 2017.
“We have a very aggressive and exciting year ahead of us,” said Garrett Reisman, SpaceX’s director of crew operations and a former space shuttle astronaut.
If everything goes according to plan, SpaceX says it can send an unmanned version of the next-generation Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station by the end of 2016. An orbital test flight with two pilots will follow in early 2017 to cap a series of test milestones leading to NASA’s certification of the capsule to carry space station crews.
Development of the Dragon crew capsule — called the Crew Dragon by SpaceX — started several years ago. SpaceX won its first tranche of federal funding for the crew-capable spaceship in 2011.
NASA awarded SpaceX a contract worth up to $2.6 billion in September to complete work on the Crew Dragon capsule. The contract’s maximum value includes up to six operational missions to rotate space station crews.
Boeing is designing a competing spacecraft named the CST-100, and NASA awarded the aerospace contractor a $4.2 billion deal to finish develop its own commercial crew transporter.
Both companies say they are on track to launch astronauts in 2017, when NASA will end its sole reliance on Russian Soyuz ferry craft.
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