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NASA has given two companies the job of resupplying the International Space Station (ISS) after the space shuttle retires. The agency has picked Orbital Sciences of Dulles and SpaceX of Hawthorne for a $3.5 billion contract. NASA says this is another effort in order to encourage companies to get more involved in space transport. The two companies that will have to deal with the job of resupplying the ISS are relatively small firms that managed to defeat the giants of space industry: Lockheed Martin of Bethesda and Boeing of Chicago. NASA will retire its shuttle fleet in 2010 and, afterwards, it will depend on Russian Rockets in order to get astronauts on the ISS until the agency will build a new American spacecraft. Orbital and SpaceX will split unmanned cargo duties during that time. The two companies were previously part of a $500 million development program designed to encourage companies to perform the work of building rockets to carry cargo to and from the space station.
Orbital has annual sales of about $1.1 billion and employs 3,800 people across the US. The bulk of its business is related to developing technologies for NASA and working on missile defense systems for the Pentagon. In addition, Orbital also sells commercial communications satellites. As for SpaceX, the company was founded by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, one of the first entrepreneurs to compete in the business of flying cargo to space. If someone wonders why did these two small companies won the seven-year contract, the answer is simple. The two had good sound plans and good technical proposals. Furthermore, NASA decided it's more appropriate to try and support an American participation in the space station. As previously mentioned, the companies beat out the Chicago-based consortium, PlanetSpace, that included Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Alliant Techsystems.
As part of the deal, SpaceX and Orbital will have to build unmanned cargo vehicles that can carry a minimum of 20 metric tons. Orbital will handle eight flights, costing about $1.9 billion and SpaceX will handle 12 flights, with the cost of about $1.6 billion. None of the companies will ferry astronauts to the station, but both of them would be responsible for restocking the ISS with provisions and experiments. As for Lockheed Martin, losing the NASA contract is somewhat of a blow, as they were expecting to get it, but analysts say it's just Orbital's turn this time, because NASA has a lot of companies involved in their work. However, the agency said it left its contract open to bring in another company in case either of the winning contractors stumbles. It remains to be seen if Orbital and SpaceX will be able to respect their part of the deal and help NASA in this difficult mission.
Image Credit: www.nasa.gov
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