Commercial Crew - Discussion Thread 3

[FutureSpaceTourist]

https://twitter.com/tsr/status/1667276137334964228

Days after a SpaceX Crew Dragon splashed down after its tenth crew flight, Boeing and NASA announced another delay in the first crewed flight of the CST-100 Starliner. A report on the diverging fortunes of the two commercial crew vehicles. buff.ly/42w7HkD

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4597/1

Whither Starliner?

by Jeff Foust
Monday, June 5, 2023

The gaping chasm between the two companies NASA selected nearly nine years ago to develop commercial crew vehicles was clearly illustrated last week.

[FutureSpaceTourist]

A review of Crew-6 and the current state of the Commercial Crew program:

https://twitter.com/stephenclark1/status/1699139271582421302

With the return of the Crew-6 mission, SpaceX's work under NASA's original commercial crew contract is complete. Meanwhile, Boeing's Starliner spacecraft still hasn't gotten off the ground with astronauts.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/09/four-person-crew-returns-to-earth-aboard-spacexs-dragon-capsule/

Four-person crew returns to Earth aboard SpaceX’s Dragon capsule
SpaceX has now completed its original commercial crew contract with NASA.

by Stephen Clark - Sep 5, 2023 5:17pm GMT

[Zed_Noir]

Recall that NASA wants a Falcon 9 booster with less than 6 flights for lofting up a crew Dragon to the ISS.

It seems that SpaceX only have 3 current boosters with less than 5 flights consisting of B1072, B1080 & B1081.

So will SpaceX have to hold these boosters for NASA missions in the future or added a few newly build boosters from time to time? Of course NASA could allow boosters with higher number of flights than the current limit in the future.

[Kiwi53]

Recall that NASA wants a Falcon 9 booster with less than 6 flights for lofting up a crew Dragon to the ISS.

It seems that SpaceX only have 3 current boosters with less than 5 flights consisting of B1072, B1080 & B1081.

So will SpaceX have to hold these boosters for NASA missions in the future or added a few newly build boosters from time to time? Of course NASA could allow boosters with higher number of flights than the current limit in the future.

It depends what SpaceX do.

If SpaceX sticks to its current 20-launch limit for the booster, and hits their 10 or even 12 launches a month target that Elon recently tweeted, then they have to build 6 to 8 new boosters a year, so there would be plenty of "low mileage" boosters available for NASA crewed launches.
If SpaceX decide to continually re-certify their boosters for more re-uses, then the supply of new or newish boosters for NASA might become more of a problem.
Or NASA could decide that based on observed performance and reliability, they're happy to have crew launched on up to 10 flights old boosters.

Only time will tell