Tuesday, April 19, 2011

SpaceX Gets $75M From NASA

Hawthorne-based Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), the commercial rocket firm run by tech mogul Elon Musk, has scored $75M from NASA as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Development (CCDev2) effort, NASA said Monday. According to NASA, the funding is part of a set of funds going to a set of companies to work on commercial crew space transportation system concepts. NASA's CCDev2 effort is aimed at accelerating the availability of U.S. commercial crew transportation to space, as the agency retires the Space Shuttle. SpaceX has had its eye on replacing the Space Shuttle, saying in January that it Falcon 9 and Dragon is the "safest path to crew transportation capability," at half the cost of the price of using Russia's Soyuz spacecraft.

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