As saber-rattling in Russia threatens to cut off America’s access to the International Space Station, NASA is set to dole out another round of funding to American space companies working to develop a manned spaceship on U.S. soil.
NASA already has seeded $1.5 billion to SpaceX, Boeing and Sierra Nevada Corp. to help develop three distinct spaceship designs.
The agency is expected to award contracts worth billions of dollars to at least one of these companies as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, a public-private venture meant to end U.S. dependency on the Russian space agency.
The United States lost the ability to send astronauts into space when NASA’s space shuttle program powered down in 2011. The U.S. currently pays Russia to fly American astronauts to the ISS for about $76 million per seat.
Russia has threatened to leave the space station in 2020, essentially shutting the research facility down four years before the U.S. plans to leave. After the U.S. imposed economic sanctions on Russia for its involvement in the Ukraine crisis, Russia threatened to stop selling its RD-180 rocket engines to the United Launch Alliance, the Boeing-Lockhead Martin joint venture that launches U.S. defense satellites.
The last American spaceship to carry an astronaut to the ISS, the Atlantis space shuttle, was built in Palmdale in the 1980s by Rockwell International.
If SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gets his way, the next American space taxi also will be made in Southern California.
Musk unveiled his Dragon V2 capsule in May at the SpaceX factory in Hawthorne.
The V2 is a manned version of the Dragon spacecraft that SpaceX uses to deliver cargo to the ISS as part of a $1.6 billion resupply contract with NASA.
The V2 would be more complicated than the unmanned cargo version because of the safeguards and redundancies required with manned flight. But SpaceX already has proven it can safely dock the Dragon on the ISS, which is a “huge strength” for the company, said Marco Caceres, senior aerospace analyst at the Teal Group, an aerospace-consulting firm.
“In terms of the system and the rocket and the capsule, I would say that SpaceX is further along just in terms of practical experience,” he said.
SpaceX likely will be the less expensive option because the V2 would launch into space atop SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, a much cheaper mode of transportation than the Atlas V, which Boeing and Sierra Nevada would use to launch their spaceships.
SpaceX builds its rocket and capsules entirely in house, which helps keep its costs down.
Boeing also has experience on its side, but the company’s size and long list of subcontractors make it less nimble than SpaceX, which was founded in 2002.
Boeing’s manned spaceship, the CST-100, uses a capsule design similar to the Dragon and would re-enter space with the help of a parachute and air bags.
The Dragon will use reverse thrusters to land “with the accuracy of a helicopter,” according to Musk, and use a parachute as backup.
The not-so-ugly duckling in the NASA competition is Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser, which looks like a sleeker, scaled-down version of the space shuttle.
Sierra Nevada’s space plane will be able to land on conventional runways much like its space shuttle forefathers and has an aesthetic advantage over its capsule competitors, which resemble 1960s space technology — at least from the outside.
Sierra Nevada has none of the space launch experience of its competitors, which will hurt the Dream Chaser’s chances of winning a NASA contract. But graceful landings and a pretty face may actually prove useful to the Sparks, Nev.-based spaceship maker.
“NASA wants to create excitement” around space exploration and a ship re-entering the atmosphere and landing on an air base is “a spectacle,” Caceres said. “If you go with a capsule, it kind of feels like you’re going backwards.”
NASA ultimately will award contracts to the company that best optimizes the risk-cost trade-off, said Steven Grundman, an aerospace analyst and Lund Fellow at the Atlantic Council.
“Whatever they do, one of them will be the optimally lower risk, lower cost and faster way to get off of Soyuz” rockets from Russia, Grundman said. “My guess is that will be NASA’s first priority.”