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Ignition Protocol / Programme

Commercial Crew

NASA with SpaceX and Boeing · United States · 2010 to today

Buying a ride instead of owning a rocket. NASA wanted its crew transport back after the Shuttle and chose to purchase a service under a fixed price contract, which moved the development risk onto the contractor and changed who eats an overrun.

Commercial Crew began as CCDev in 2010 and became fixed price contracts on 16 September 2014: 2.6 billion dollars to SpaceX and 4.2 billion dollars to Boeing for the same job. SpaceX flew a crew in May 2020 and has flown routinely since. Boeing has carried a crew once, in June 2024, and could not bring them home in the vehicle they launched in.

How it went

  1. 01

    NASA retired the Shuttle in 2011 with nothing to replace it and bought Soyuz seats for nine years while the commercial vehicles were built.

  2. 02

    Two providers were funded on purpose, so that one failing would not strand the programme, and that is precisely what the arrangement ended up being needed for.

  3. 03

    Demo-2 put Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on the station in May 2020, and Crew-1 started routine rotations on 16 November 2020.

  4. 04

    Starliner launched with a crew on 5 June 2024, lost thruster performance and leaked helium; NASA flew it home empty and its two astronauts returned on Crew-9 in March 2025.

  5. 05

    Crew-12 launched on 13 February 2026 as the twelfth operational rotation, while the first operational Starliner flight was rewritten as an uncrewed cargo mission with no date attached.

What it flew

What it cost, what it got

The United States got crew transport back in May 2020, and by July 2026 twenty crewed Dragon flights had been made under the programme. The redundancy cost 4.2 billion dollars for a Boeing capsule that has carried one crew, could not be trusted to return them, and now flies cargo instead.

Sources

  1. 1Commercial Crew ProgramNASA
  2. 2Commercial Crew ProgramWikipedia
  3. 3List of human spaceflightsWikipedia