October 01, 2012

Frank Morring, Jr. Washington

NASA believes its previous and upcoming commercial cargo missions to the International Space Station give Space Exploration Technologies Inc. (SpaceX) the best chance of transporting a human crew to the space station first, but the brash startup is not a sure bet to win the commercial crew race.

While company founder Elon Musk says he will fly a crew to the station before the end of 2015—earlier than any of his competitors—his main NASA customer is a little more cautious.

“There are some systems that are acceptable in cargo that may not be acceptable in crew,” says William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for human exploration and operations. “There's obviously a lot of stuff that needs to be added in terms of life support; there's some cooling that needs to be there, humidity control, atmosphere monitors. There are a lot of other little subtle things that have to be there. So they've got the good basic capsule design, but I think there's still a little bit of work for them to do in those other areas.”

Still, in his formal source-selection document, Gerstenmaier found that the SpaceX proposal for the Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) program “provides the earliest crewed demonstration flight under a credible schedule at the lowest development cost.” On that basis, NASA awarded the Hawthorne, Calif., company $440 million in federal seed money to continue work on the crew version of the Dragon capsule that reached the ISS in May, and is scheduled for at least one more return trip before the end of this year (AW&ST May 28, p. 35).

“I think there are advantages of having flown cargo, but then there's a statement in the document where I caution that we need to know how they're going to transition from cargo to crew,” says Gerstenmaier.

That will not be too big a problem, Musk says with typical bravado. A lot of the work has been done, he says, and the rest can be completed within the time constraints laid out in the company proposal.