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Comparison of CRS2 Vehicles

I've been wanting to do this post for awhile - actually ever since SNC successfully did their drop test of the Dream Chaser a while back (2017-11-11) and there was a Faceboook discussion on the costs of all the CRS2 vehicles and their capabilities. Let's do a breakdown. CRS2 Vehicles The Commerical Resupply Services 2 contract from NASA was awarded to three companies: SpaceX, OrbitalATK, and Sierra Nevada Corporation. The total value of all contracts awarded were close to $14 billion. Each company was awarded a minimum of six launches each. This is for missions from 2019-2024. I thumbed around the internet to put the following table together. Most sources came from here . Dream Chaser's weight was taken from here , although I'm guessing this is for the Crew version. Here's a general chart for you of the above. Apologies for the poor formatting, I'm not great with trying to embed Google Spreadsheets into Blogger.  Let's go over some addit

Why pay NASA?

I've found myself repeating this in a few places, so I figured I would just write this one more time and then moving forward I'll just link to this post in the future. I listen to The Planetary Society 's podcast Planetary Radio and in the most recent episode they've mentioned that NASA's budget is due up in Congress. They've started a petition to resolve some conflicting budget proposals from the Senate and the House, which I'll link to here . In short though; the general idea is to make sure that we keep money flowing to planetary science and overall increase NASA's budget. If you have a few moments, please take some time to sign the petition and click the send button . It will auto resolve your Senator and Representatives based on your information that you enter so you don't have to figure that out for yourself. Also, the letter is editable, so if you have some additional comments to share regarding NASA, you can add those comments in. As