Sept 18 (Reuters) – NASA said Friday that the agency had given SpaceX a $946 million contract to fly three more astronaut missions \u200cto the International Space Station, extending the company’s crewed flights to \u200cthe station through 2030. <\/p>\n
The deal brings SpaceX’s total number of NASA astronaut flights under the \u200bcontract to 17 and raises the contract’s total value to $5.92 billion. NASA is relying heavily on SpaceX to keep astronauts traveling to and from the station while it works to maintain a second U.S. option through Boeing. <\/p>\n
The contract \u200ccovers preparing astronauts and spacecraft \u2060on the ground, launching them, operating the mission in space, bringing crews home and recovering the capsule. It also \u2060includes carrying supplies and keeping the spacecraft at the station as an emergency escape vehicle. <\/p>\n
The agency chose SpaceX and Boeing in 2014 to develop spacecraft capable \u200bof \u200bcarrying astronauts to the space station. The \u200bgoal was to give the \u200cUnited States a regular domestic launch capability after NASA retired the space shuttle, ending years of reliance on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft. <\/p>\n
Boeing’s Starliner suffered problems on its 2024 crewed test flight, prompting NASA to return the capsule empty and bring astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams home on a SpaceX \u200cDragon after a planned 10-day mission became \u200ba more than nine-month ISS stay. <\/p>\n
NASA approved SpaceX’s \u200bsystem for astronaut flights \u200bin November 2020. Since then, SpaceX has become the agency’s \u200cmain provider for rotating crews at \u200bthe station, using \u200bits Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket to carry up to four astronauts, as well as supplies. <\/p>\n
NASA wants both SpaceX and Boeing \u200boperating crew flights so \u200cthat an accident or technical problem affecting one company does \u200bnot halt US astronaut access to the station. <\/p>\n
(Reporting by Akash Sriram \u200bin Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sept 18 (Reuters) – NASA said Friday that the agency had given SpaceX a $946 million contract to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":852948,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[16794,3631,718,79,1513,73531],"class_list":["post-852947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-boeing","tag-international-space-station","tag-nasa","tag-science","tag-spacex","tag-spacex-dragon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/852947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=852947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/852947\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/852948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=852947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=852947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=852947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}