THE SPACE STATION RESUPPLY FLEET

by Ian O'Neill

news, space, international space station, iss,

A Commercial Future? (manned and unmanned)

In an effort to stimulate private spaceflight and provide a solution to the "5-year gap" between shuttle decommissioning and Constellation Program completion, NASA is offering ISS re-supply contracts worth billions of dollars to companies that can prove they can launch payloads into space.

Could commercial vendors soon be ferrying cargo, and eventually passengers, to low-Earth orbit?

Image: The front-runners in the commercial race to space: the Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) Dragon capsule (left) and the Orbital Space Sciences Cygnus capsule (right) are two projects that have already won ISS re-supply contracts (SpaceX/Orbital/NASA)