On Tuesday, NASA announced $50 million in grants to companies working on spacecraft and other hardware for use in launching humans into space. The money, drawn from the $1 billion in government stimulus funds NASA received in 2009, will help pay for the following five projects.
, an aerospace company based in Kent, Washington, and led by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, is working on a rocket-propelled vehicle called New Shepard to carry people and microgravity experiments on suborbital trips into space.
It will receive $3.7 million to help develop the vehicle’s crew compartment and launch escape system, which would propel the crew to safety in case of a problem during launch. (Image: Blue Origin)
The Houston-based of aerospace giant Boeing will receive $18 million to help it develop a crew capsule it hopes will one day carry NASA astronauts into space.
Boeing says it began work on the capsule with a view to ferrying passengers to the private, inflatable space stations that Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace aims to launch as early as 2014. A prototype space station launched by Bigelow in 2006 is seen here. (Image: Bigelow Aerospace)
, a small company that builds spacecraft hardware based in Tucson, Arizona, will receive $1.4 million to help it develop a life support system that scrubs out carbon dioxide and replenishes oxygen in the air.
The company has also used its air-regeneration expertise to design an advanced diving helmet, pictured here. (Image: Paragon Space Development)
, an electronics and engineering firm based in Sparks, Nevada, will receive $20 million dollars to help its subsidiary develop a spacecraft called Dream Chaser.
A sort of miniature space shuttle, Dream Chaser is based on a plane-like spacecraft that NASA itself designed in the 1980s, inspired by spy photos of a Soviet prototype. Dream Chaser could carry seven people to low-Earth orbit. (Image: SpaceDev)
, a joint venture by aerospace titans Lockheed Martin and Boeing, sells Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rockets. It hopes the rockets, which are currently used to send spacecraft into orbit, can be “man rated” to launch humans as well.
It will receive $6.7 million for an emergency detection system that would monitor the rockets’ health and provide warnings in case the crew needed to eject to safety. A Delta 4 rocket is shown here. (Image: United Launch Alliance)
