NASA to Announce CCiCAP Commercial Crew Winners on Friday
NASA will announce the winners of its Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCAP) awards on Friday, August 3, 2012. The much anticipated decision will be released at 9:00 am ET on Friday, with a news conference from Kennedy Space Center at 10:00 am ET.
CCiCAP is the third in a series of NASA Space Act Agreement awards to facilitate the development of space transportation systems by companies instead of the government that can take people to and from low Earth orbit. NASA’s interest is in transportation to and from the International Space Station (ISS), but some of the companies in the running also anticipate a broader “space tourism” market.
The first two rounds of the competition were under the Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program. This round is called CCiCAP to emphasize that NASA now is interested in complete (“integrated”) concepts that include a rocket, spacecraft and associated systems.
NASA’s commercial cargo program received a lot of visibility earlier this year with the launch and reentry of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft. SpaceX plans to develop a version of Dragon to meet the commercial crew requirements. The competitors for the CCiCAP awards are not known officially since it is still in the competition stage, but industry rumors are that SpaceX, Sierra Nevada, Boeing, and ATK are among the bidders.
User Comments
SpacePolicyOnline.com has the right (but not the obligation) to monitor the comments and to remove any materials it deems inappropriate. We do not post comments that include links to other websites since we have no control over that content nor can we verify the security of such links.