NASA Orders SpaceX Mission To global Space Station

On Friday, NASA took significant step towards expanding research opportunities on board the ISS with its first mission order from Hawthorne, California based SpaceX to launch astronauts from U.S. soil.

NASA’s Commercial Crew Program administered the CCtCap contracts and is now operational with each company guaranteeing commercial transportation system designs.

The flight is one of two guaranteed missions that SpaceX secured the rights to in a 2014 contract with NASA.

The recent SpaceX order was the second of these contracts.

She also added that it’s important to have USA companies with healthy and robust capabilities to deliver astronauts and scientific experiments from Earth to the low-orbit space station.

However, the company isn’t the first tapped by NASA to return manned launches to the U.S. In May, the Boeing Company received a crew mission order.

The team of astronauts will be carried to the worldwide Space Station aboard SpaceX’s revolutionary spacecraft Crew Dragon that has been successfully tested in May 2015, after four years in which American astronauts have been taken to the global Space Station by Russians. “We’re honored to be developing this capability for NASA and our country”, said SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell. There is no decision yet as to which mission will go first – the Dragon or Starliner one – so we have an actual race on our hands here for first commercial crewed mission.

Since four years ago, when the Space Shuttles were drown out, all transportation of staff going to and from the worldwide Space Station for all 16 nations had to rely on the Russian Space Agency. Each of the contracts enables at least two and as many as six potential missions.

This commercial crew mission will be sent up in late 2017 but no exact data has been chosen. The spacecraft will stay at the station for around 210 days, and would be here as an emergency lifeboat at that time.

According to Martin’s audit, the agency “continues to improve its process for identifying and managing health and human performance risks associated with space flight”, but that “NASA’s management of crew health risks could benefit from increased efforts to integrate expertise from all related disciplines”.

ISS chief scientist Julie Robinson says commercial crew launches are really important for helping them meet the growing demand for research on ISS.