NASA estimates it will save as much as $30 billion by using third-party companies like Boeing and SpaceX to build spacecraft to shuttle astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
In a new report released Wednesday, May 13, the space agency says the Commercial Crew program, which has been criticized for substantial delays, will result in taxpayer savings over the life of the program that exceed the entire 2020 NASA budget.
“While not done yet, [Commercial Crew] is poised to save the Agency approximately $20B-$30B, and provide two, independent crew transportation systems,” NASA said.
NASA’s 2020 budget currently stands at $21 billion.
The Commercial Crew program has seen two contracts awarded to third-party spacecraft companies.
Boeing has taken in roughly $4.8 billion over the past 10 years, while SpaceX has earned $3.1 billion. NASA’s estimate of the savings from those contracts reflects a comparison to previously estimated costs to build its own ships, a program that was known as Constellation.
The first Commercial Crew flight is set to occur at 1:33 p.m. PT on Wednesday May 27. NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley entered quarantine Wednesday to prepare for the flight. They’ll travel to the ISS on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft.
They will be the first American astronauts to fly to the station on a spacecraft launched from American soil since the last Space Shuttle flight in 2011.
The quarantine has nothing to do with the recent COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. Pre-flight two-week quarantines have been standard operating procedure for NASA for decades.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.