NASA added the 3rd company to list of space carriers – Terra Colombia

NASA has added a third company to his short list of space carriers. This is a signature of Nevada that will retrieve a miniature version of the shuttle.

The US space agency announced Thursday that Sierra Nevada Corp. will join SpaceX and Orbital ATK in the freight to the International Space Station. These flights, even for commissioning, will take place between 2019 and 2024.

Sierra Nevada competed for the contract of carriage crew from NASA, but lost in 2014 to SpaceX and Boeing. The contract of carriage of goods is a second chance to sign Sparks, Nevada, which is developing a smaller version of the space shuttle Dream Chaser call. The other companies use standard capsules.

As SpaceX, Sierra Nevada plans to make his shots from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The ship will land back on Earth as did the ferry and bring back experiments and other objects of the season.

“In a few years, the world will see again a US vehicle and return winged space off a runway,” he said in a statement Mark Sirangelo, vice president Sierra Nevada Space Systems.

The program director of the NASA space station, Kirk Shireman, said he had been assured that the Dream Chaser could land on many tracks in many places. The aim is to recover scientific samples as soon as possible for analysis. A landing on runway would be softer than the fall parachute sea SpaceX uses.

Now SpaceX can only bring back objects. In its latest proposal, SpaceX has also offered Dragon capsules return their land, Shireman said. Other ships, like Cygnus Orbital and the Russian Progress, are filled with waste and burn upon entering the atmosphere.

The recent accidents in SpaceX and Orbital launches prompted NASA to seek a third supplier to increase its flexibility.

Orbital launched their ships from Wallops Island, Virginia, until an explosion at SpaceX launch in 2014 suffered its own failure to launch last summer.

NASA assigned in 2008 its first supply contracts. The first flight was in 2012. The last contract calls for a minimum of six flights of each of the three companies.

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