Commercial Crew Development Program

From SpaceWiki

The Commercial Crew Development Program or CCDev is a technology development program at NASA designed to stimulate the development of commercial space vehicles that can carry crews to low earth orbit. It is run by the Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Office, an office which has one of the best acronyms in all of NASA: C3PO. The CCDev program currently has two phases. One phase for 2010 awarded $50 million (originally intended to be $150 million) to five space companies to fund various new technology developments for the spaceflight industry. NASA hopes to have about $200 million for the second phase of CCDev in 2011 and is currently examining proposals.

CCDev Phase 1

• Blue Origin - $3.7M for an innovative 'pusher' Launch Abort System (LAS) and composite pressure vessels
• Boeing - $18M for development of the CST-100 capsule
• Paragon Space Development Corporation - $1.4M for a plug-and-play environmental control and life support system (ECLSS)
• Sierra Nevada Corporation - $20M for development of the Dream Chaser spaceplane, a reusable spaceplane vehicle that can transport cargo and up to eight people to low-Earth orbit.
• United Launch Alliance - $6.7M for an Emergency Detection System (EDS) for human-rating its EELV launch vehicles

CCDev Phase 2

• Orbital Sciences has submitted a proposal for a new spaceplane.
• Boeing wants to do testing of subsystems for the CST-100 vehicle
• SpaceX would like money to develop their launch abort system needed for humans to ride on the Dragon spacecraft
• Sierra Nevada Corporation would like to pursue further development of the Dream Chaser
• United Launch Alliance wants funds to human-rate the Atlas V