Why Elon Musk's SpaceX is launching astronauts for Nasa

Elon Musk's SpaceX is flying people to and from the International Space Station (ISS), using the Crew Dragon vehicle. But why is Nasa paying a private company to launch its astronauts?

To understand the background to the Crew Dragon missions, we need to go back almost 20 years to a tragic accident.

On 1 February 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart while re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. All seven astronauts aboard perished in the disaster.

The loss of Columbia and its crew was the trigger for a dramatic shift in direction for America's human spaceflight programme.

On 14 January 2004, President George W Bush announced that the space shuttle would be retired after completion of the International Space Station (ISS). In its place, America would build a new vehicle capable of returning astronauts to the Moon.
The following year, then-Nasa chief Mike Griffin announced that the completion of the ISS would, for the first time, open up commercial opportunities for the routine transportation of cargo and astronauts to low-Earth orbit.

This, Griffin reasoned, was required to free up enough funds to achieve a Moon return. Nasa established a Commercial Crew & Cargo Program Office (C3PO) to oversee the effort.

At the time, SpaceX, the company started by South African-born entrepreneur Elon Musk was just a few years old. Musk had lofty ambitions about bringing down the cost of spaceflight by re-using space hardware and settling humans on Mars. สล็อตออนไลน์

"SpaceX was founded to make life multi-planetary," says Jessica Jensen, director of Starship mission hardware and operation at SpaceX.

But, she adds: "We were a very small company for several years. So we had to look for opportunities - how do you go from being a small company to actually putting people into orbit. When Nasa came out with the need to fly cargo to and from the International Space Station, we jumped on that."