NASA Orders First Commercial Crew Mission to Space Station from SpaceX

universetoday.com ^ | on November 21, 2015 | Ken Kremer

[BenLurkin]

Restoring America’s ability to once again launch US astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) from US soil on US rockets took another significant step forward when NASA ordered the first the agency’s first commercial crew rotation mission from the Hawthorne, California based-company SpaceX. NASA and SpaceX hope that the blastoff with a crew of up to four astronauts will take place by late 2017.

The new Nov. 20 award from NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP) office to launch the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule follows up on an earlier commercial crew rotation mission award this past May to the Boeing Company of Houston to launch its CST-100 Starliner astronaut crew capsule to the ISS.

Since the retirement of NASA’s Space Shuttle orbiters in 2011, all American and ISS partner astronauts have been forced to hitch a ride on the Russian Soyuz capsule for flights to the ISS and back, at a current cost of over $70 million per seat.

[PROCON]

I think, for diversity's sake, America needs to send a muslim to the ISS.

A side question:

Can a suicide vest explode in a weightless environment?

[Nuc 1.1]

The greatest step in restoring our space flight ability is getting rid of president 0 and the dim’s.

[alpo]

Are the commercial launchers still using second-hand russian rocket motors?

[Jack Hydrazine]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9
The next launch will be Falcon 9 Flight 20, currently scheduled for December 2015. The mission payload will be 11 Orbcomm-OG2 second-generation satellites.[127] Flight 20 will also be the first flight of the upgraded Falcon 9 v1.1 full thrust (with a 30 percent increase in power).

Falcon 9 first stage trucks into the Cape ahead of OG-2 mission
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/11/falcon-9-first-stage-cape-og-2-mission/
20NOV2015

SpaceX’s Return To Flight (RTF) milestone remains on track for December, as the Falcon 9 first stage – tasked with the launch of the ORBCOMM-2 mission – arrived at its Cape Canaveral launch site early on Friday. The launch of the OG-2 mission will also be the debut of the Full Thrust version of the SpaceX workhorse.

No launch date has been set, with a preliminary target of mid-December currently the most-likely estimate based on what is now a confirmed shipping of the first stage to SpaceX’s launch site at Cape Canaveral’s SLC-40.

Providing the Static Fire proceeds as planned, engineers will take the flow into a Launch Readiness Review (LRR), which will then confirm the launch date for the OG-2 mission with eleven new satellites for the company.

Providing the latest Falcon 9 mission with OG-2 is successful, SpaceX is set to pick up the pace to move through its busy order book. Launch dates for future missions remain speculative ahead of the company’s RTF goal – although a large amount of Falcon 9 hardware is ready to race into space.

List of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_Heavy_launches

[SunkenCiv]

They’re still on track to test the Falcon Heavy in May? I don’t know how Elon Musk is able to buy pants that fit.