NASA expands SpaceX crewed mission contract by $946 million

NASA has expanded its contract with SpaceX by $946 million for crewed missions, increasing the total program volume to 17 flights. This institutional support comes as SpaceX demonstrates high operational capacity, recently completing three separate flights in less than 13 hours.

These operations included transporting four astronauts to the International Space Station, orbiting the NROL-97 reconnaissance satellite, and executing a Transporter mission that deployed numerous payloads. Among these was a prototype satellite for Google’s Suncatcher project, which explores the potential of space-based artificial intelligence computing to address terrestrial power and cooling constraints.