Washington. March 1st. INTERFAX - The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has agreed with the private aerospace company SpaceX to add three additional missions to transport crews to the International Space Station (ISS) on Crew Dragon ships.
"NASA has added three additional missions of the Space Research Technologies Corporation (SpaceX), located in Hawthorne, California, to carry out the transportation of crews to the International Space Station under the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contract," a statement on the department's website said.
According to NASA, the total amount of payments under the contract has grown to about $ 3.5 billion, the contract itself will be valid until March 31, 2028, at the same time, NASA does not lose the right to add additional missions to the ISS, if necessary.
At the moment, NASA has contracts for the delivery of crews to the ISS with two companies - Boeing and SpaceX. However, only SpaceX spacecraft have been certified by NASA to carry out missions to transport astronauts to the ISS, since Boeing is currently unable to deliver people to the station due to the unavailability of the CST-100 Starliner spacecraft and other mission components necessary for its implementation.
According to the SpaceX and NASA contract, the last announced flight to the ISS on the Crew Dragon spacecraft is scheduled for March 2023. The addition of three additional post-certification missions on SpaceX ships will allow NASA to fill in the missing number of flights that were intended for Boeing.
The department noted that NASA still needs two contractors to transport crews to the ISS for additional confidence in the continuous transportation of astronauts to the station and back to Earth. They also stressed that the management is set to alternate SpaceX and Boeing missions as soon as the companies are able to fulfill the terms of the contract on an equal footing.
In October last year, the head of NASA's commercial manned flight program, Steve Stitch, announced NASA's plans to seek to increase the number of flights to the ISS by these two companies.
"Both SpaceX and Boeing received six post-certification missions of flights to the ISS under a contract, six in total for two companies. Boeing has received the right to conduct three of them. Now we know that the work of the ISS will be extended for a period later than 2024. Therefore, at the moment we are looking for a way to add the number of missions to both contracts, and in the next few months it will become clear what will be done in this regard (...) We want both SpaceX and Boeing to fly once a year," Stitch said.
