The Private Space Race

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Boris_Badenov

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This is a very long article that lays it out quite nicely.

The Private Space Race

“We will be providing industry with NASA technical expertise,” said NASA’s deputy administrator Lori Garver, speaking at the U.S. Federal Aviation Admin.’s Commercial Space Transportation Conference in February. “We will provide serious seed money ... and a firm commitment to buy crew transportation services on the market side.” To diversify its risk, NASA is funding competitive systems. “No single commercial system will represent the critical path,” says Garver. “We’re going to see the most exciting space race that NASA’s seen in a long time, and there’s likely to be more than one winner.”
 
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emudude

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Yep, exciting times ahead :D I'm already gunning for the first entry-level positions in these companies, wherever they may be...who knows, maybe I'll be working for the future Autonomous Systems department in SpaceX someday :p
 
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oldAtlas_Eguy

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The COTS program seems to be on its way to be a success. Now if we could get Commercial Crew to be done the same way, we could have crewed launches in less than five years.

Private industry lives and dies by supply and demand. Demand for crewed at the moment seems to be only coming from the government. So without government putting money on the table Commercial Crew will struggle along slowly if at all. If a purely comercial demand like say tourism shows up in significant amounts for one or two launches a year then it might go faster or more companies become involved with related development for lowering ticket prices. As far as freight launch costs the people to beat are the Russians. If you can beat their price then customers will flock to your door. SpaceX is close to beating their prices and with a Crewed Dragon they would certainly beat the Russian $50 mil per astronaut price, more like at most $20 mil.
 
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