NASA needs extra private-sector corporations to ferry astronauts up into space, together with missions to and from the International Space Station. The company has put out a request for info, an preliminary step in direction of awarding contracts.
NASA’s announcement comes simply days after one such private-sector contractor, Boeing, introduced that the subsequent take a look at flight of its Starliner astronaut taxi has been delayed until 2022. Starliner was initially slated to launch in August, earlier than a problem with defective valves pushed the schedule again right into a yet-to-be-determined time subsequent 12 months.
“NASA has a need for additional crew rotation flights to the space station beyond the twelve missions the agency has awarded Boeing and SpaceX under the current contracts,” Phil McAlister, NASA’s director of business spaceflight, stated in a statement.
Related: Commercial crews and private astronauts will boost International Space Station’s science
Those present contracts date from 2014, when NASA awarded Boeing and SpaceX transport contracts, by way of the Commercial Crew Program, to hold astronauts to and from the International Space Station following the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011. Boeing’s reply to the contract has been Starliner — a spacecraft that has up to now flown just one uncrewed take a look at flight that didn’t succeed at reaching the space station.
Meanwhile, SpaceX has already flown three crewed missions to the orbiting lab (two operational missions and one take a look at flight), and the corporate is preparing to launch another crew of four astronauts to the station subsequent week.
NASA’s authentic plan was for preliminary business crew flights to go up in 2017. But delays on each SpaceX and Boeing’s components meant that NASA needed to proceed sending astronauts to the ISS on board Russian Soyuz flights. The first astronauts to reach on the ISS by way of a Crew Dragon — Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley — did so in May 2020 with the Demo-2 mission.
Now, NASA seemingly needs to bolster its checklist of choices. They’ve slated 2027 as a deadline for future flight methods to accumulate certification. The variety of extra business crew missions that NASA intends to fly, in addition to the variety of seats that the company intends to buy on every mission, shall be decided “depending on mission requirements.”
NASA’s request for info can be found here.
Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
