NASA will purchase seats for the transport of trade missions organized at the International Space Station (ISS) within the 2024. At the beginning of the 2020, NASA should issue a tender for any suppliers interested in providing the service but the likely competitors to provide it should be the two companies that NASA has already hired for human space flight services to the ISS: SpaceX and Boeing. The news is reported on reccom.org.
Places purchased on these private missions would be in addition to test flights and operational missions that NASA has already contracted with them through its commercial crew program.
Unlike "normal" NASA ISS missions lasting around 6 months, these commercial passenger flights will include an ISS stay of no more than 30 days.
This announcement is the latest in a series of NASA moves to open the ISS to commercialization, as the US government attempts to renew the agency's focus on missions beyond low earth orbit (LEO).
The International Space Station (ISS) has been the exclusive destination of government-sponsored astronauts for nearly two decades now, and has been continuously inhabited by humans since 2000.
Approximately the size of a football field, the ISS orbits the Earth in LEO at around 400 kilometers in altitude and provides a perfect environment for studies and research in microgravity and space environment to conduct biology, physics, experiments astronomy and more.
Funding for the laboratory is provided by the participating countries, including United States, Russia, Japan, Canada and Member States of the European Space Agency. The ROSCOSMOS, the space agency of Russia, was the only provider of services for transporting human beings to the ISS since the last Space Shuttle mission in the 2011. Now, NASA's commercial program provides that SpaceX and Boeing will be able to launch human beings to the ISS in the 2020.
The Trump administration initially tried to completely withdraw US funds for the ISS from the 2024, a proposal that was met with criticism from some high-ranking NASA officials who claimed that astronaut safety could be compromised by early termination of the program.