Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket and a Crew Dragon spacecraft are ready to launch NASA’s Crew-4 mission.
Trevor Mahlmann
NASA said this week that it plans to buy five additional Crew Dragon missions from SpaceX to bring astronauts to the International Space Station.
While the space agency’s press release doesn’t specifically say so, these may be the last flights NASA needs to keep the space station fully occupied by 2030. At this time, there are no international agreement signed to keep the station flying until then, but this new hiring sends a strong signal that the space agency expects the advanced orbital site to continue flying for so long.
The announcement also suggests that SpaceX will fly more than twice the number of crews on the space station than the other partner in NASA’s commercial crew program, Boeing. Under the new agreement, SpaceX would fly 14 manned missions to the Crew Dragon station, and Boeing would fly six during the station’s lifetime.
Let’s get the math down to this. SpaceX has already launched four manned operational missions to the space station, dated November 15, 2020, launching the Crew-1 mission. SpaceX has two more flights under its original crew contract with NASA. In February 2022, NASA awarded fixed price contracts for the Crew-7, Crew-8, and Crew-9 missions to SpaceX. The latest announcement would increase the total number of Crew Dragon missions to 14.
As for Boeing, it has not yet flown any operational missions to the station. The company recently completed an unmanned test flight with great success in May. Looking to the future, Boeing will likely complete a Starliner manned flight test later this year or early 2023 and then make its first operational mission sometime in 2023, or possibly later if flight problems are discovered. test with crew.
Announcements
“Boeing’s orbital flight-2 test went very well and we look forward to certifying the Starliner system in the near future,” Phil McAllister, NASA’s director of commercial space, said in a statement to the agency. . “However, we will need additional SpaceX missions to implement our strategy of getting each vendor to do alternate missions once a year.”
NASA has not yet announced the purchase of additional Starliner missions. This seems prudent, as Boeing has not yet fully demonstrated Starliner’s capabilities with the crew on board. But according to the numbers in this week’s announcement, it now looks likely that there will be no additional manned missions to grant to Boeing.
Because? Because NASA only plans to do two manned space station missions a year, with four astronauts on board each. SpaceX would be hired for 10 additional missions and Boeing has six. There are eight years left in the space station if it stops flying in 2030. While additional modifications to these contracts are always possible, it appears that NASA has booked all the trips it needs for the life of the space station. to 2030.
This does not necessarily mean that Starliner will fly only six manned missions. Boeing said it intended to use the vehicle for private astronaut missions as well, probably at commercial space stations under development. For example, Boeing is a partner in the Blue Orbital Reef space station project.
But it is worth noting that Starliner is currently only capable of flying with the United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket. Boeing has only secured enough launches to complete its original six Starliner operational missions for NASA before the Atlas V rocket takes off. This means that in order to fly Starliner into orbit, Boeing would have to pay money to the Vulcan rocket. of the United Launch Alliance or some other vehicle. Boeing has not definitively defined its plans for any post-Atlas V mission to Starliner.