WASHINGTON — NASA plans to add more missions to SpaceX’s commercial crew contract, protecting the agency from the possibility that Boeing’s spacecraft is never certified for missions to the International Space Station.
In a May 18 procurement filing, NASA announced its intent to add six post-certification missions, or PCMs, to SpaceX’s commercial crew contract on a sole-source basis. The agency would order up to three of those missions at the time it added them, formally starting preparations for them.
NASA last modified SpaceX’s commercial crew contract in 2022, adding five missions for $1.4 billion. That extension took the contract through the Crew-14 mission. The Crew-12 mission is currently at the ISS.
NASA gave several reasons for adding the missions to SpaceX’s contract, many linked to the fact that SpaceX is the only NASA-certified crew transportation system, or CTS, for going to the ISS.
“It is necessary to award additional PCMs to SpaceX given the recently shortened ISS mission durations, technical issues and schedule delays encountered by Boeing, the allocation of missions between Boeing and SpaceX, NASA’s projections for when an alternative CTS may become available, and the ongoing technical challenges of maintaining a reliable CTS capability for crewed flights to ISS,” the agency stated.
Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner has yet to be certified for crewed flights. A cargo-only flight, Starliner-1, was anticipated sometime this year but was not on a NASA manifest for crew and cargo missions to the station released earlier this month. NASA and Boeing modified their commercial crew contract in November 2024 to reduce the number of missions from six to four, including Starliner-1, with options for two more.
NASA also had planned to extend crew rotation missions from six to eight months, which would have had the effect of reducing the number of missions by one, from four to three, every two years. However, NASA said at a May 11 briefing it is retaining six-month ISS missions to maximize utilization of the station in its final years.
Adding six missions to the contract would cover three years of ISS operations, at a rate of one mission every six months. With the currently contracted missions, running through Crew-14, flying through the fall of 2027, the extension would provide coverage through late 2030, when the ISS is slated for retirement. NASA has previously stated the last crewed mission would likely spend a year at the station.
