Commercial Crew
A new era of human spaceflight began when a billionaire’s white-and-black rocket, with a capsule perched on top, overcame the day’s 50-50 weather forecast to propel NASA astronauts into orbit.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft successfully launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on May 30, 2020. This liftoff marked the first time in nine years that NASA astronauts launched from U.S. soil. And for SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk in 2002, it was the company’s first time launching people — a long-held ambition, even if Musk didn’t dare believe it would come true.
NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, established as a standalone program on April 5, 2011, takes a very different approach from the Space Shuttle Program where NASA made all the design decisions and then owned and operated the vehicles.
NASA would give its contractors 10,000 to 12,000 requirements for a shuttle’s design. These requirements ranged from the ability to reach a certain orbit to how much stainless steel was included in bolts.
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For Commercial Crew, NASA only had 300 requirements. And they were mostly related to safety, such as an abort system to carry the spacecraft away from the rocket should a problem occur during launch and a statistical calculation that placed loss of crew at no more than 1 in every 270 flights.
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NASA did not care if the Commercial Crew companies proposed a winged vehicle or a capsule, as long as the system was safe, reliable and cost effective. Ultimately, the two companies selected chose capsules.