Yesterday NASA handed out more than a billion dollars to the companies it hopes will take over shuttling astronauts to Earth orbit—and get the agency of its current dependency on the Russians, now that the space shuttle is retired. Boeing and SpaceX took home the biggest chunks of change, in excess of $400 million each. Sierra Nevada received more than $200 million.
After the official NASA announcement, SpaceX CEO and chief designer Elon Musk took questions from reporters about where this cash boost would take his company. Musk expects SpaceX's first manned flight in 2015; a manned trip to the International Space Station would be a year after. (SpaceX rendezvoused its Dragon capsule with the ISS this spring, but the capsule was unmanned.) Within two years he hopes to be experimenting with a lander with legs.
During this year's unmanned rendezvous, a robotic arm reached and pulled the Dragon into the ISS. Musk says SpaceX plans to dock without the robotic arm in the future. That said, the capsule itself won't change much from carrying cargo to carrying crew. "If someone were to stowaway on the unmanned version of Dragon, they would have been fine," Musk says.
With the help of the NASA funding, Mush says he expects hiring at SpaceX's Cape Canaveral launch site to increase by 1000 employees over 5 years. With all the commercial launches from the Cape, that the launch activity might exceed that of the shuttle. "Previously, America was not competitive at commercial space launch," he says. SpaceX still needs to conduct ground and in-flight tests of its launch abort system, which Musk hopes to do at the Cape."We'll be webcasting those tests live so you can see what'll happen, good or bad."
It will cost a billion dollars to get manned spaceflight off the ground, Musk says. The NASA award covers half of that, so SpaceX will still be contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to its own cause. "This award takes us pretty far," he says. "It takes human beings into orbit, which is pretty good." NASA certainly hopes Musk gets there fast, since it currently has no way to transport astronauts other than Russia's hardy old Soyuz. "Soyuz is a good system but they are charging over 63 million a seat," Musk says.