Late Thursday, SpaceX and its founder, billionaire Elon Musk, unveiled the Dragon V2 spaceship. The Dragon V2 is vying to be one of the first U.S.-built spaceships to carry NASA astronauts to the International Space Station since the space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011. SpaceX and two competitors, Boeing and Sierra Nevada Corp., are each getting more than $1 billion from NASA to create a shuttle replacement, and NASA is expected to announce sometime over the next few months which projects will have an actual spaceflight around the year 2017.
For the past two years, Dragon cargo capsules have been going up to the International Space Station, but those spacecraft are not made to carry people. If launch abort tests go well, Musk believes the Dragon V2's first flight in orbit (minus a crew) might happen in 2015, and a version with actual test pilots could follow in 2016. Musk doesn't plan on stopping at the ISS, though. As NBC News reports, he believes sending colonists to Mars is "where things need to go in the long term."
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Today's political cartoons - November 23, 2024Cartoons Saturday's cartoons - qualifications, tax cuts, and more
-
Long summer days in Iceland's highlandsThe Week Recommends While many parts of this volcanic island are barren, there is a 'desolate beauty' to be found in every corner
-
The Democrats: time for wholesale reform?Talking Point In the 'wreckage' of the election, the party must decide how to rebuild
-
Dark energy data suggest Einstein was rightSpeed Read Albert Einstein's 1915 theory of general relativity has been proven correct, according to data collected by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument
-
New DNA tests of Pompeii dead upend popular storiesSpeed Read An analysis of skeletal remains reveals that some Mount Vesuvius victims have been wrongly identified
-
NASA's Europa Clipper blasts off, seeking an oceanSpeed Read The ship is headed toward Jupiter on a yearslong journey
-
Detailed map of fly's brain holds clues to human mindSpeed Read This remarkable fruit fly brain analysis will aid in future human brain research
-
Blind people will listen to next week's total eclipseSpeed Read While they can't see the event, they can hear it with a device that translates the sky's brightness into music
-
Melting polar ice is messing with global timekeepingSpeed Read Ice loss caused by climate change is slowing the Earth's rotation
-
An amphibian that produces milk?speed read Caecilians, worm-like amphibians that live underground, produce a milk-like substance for their hatchlings
-
Jupiter's Europa has less oxygen than hopedspeed read Scientists say this makes it less likely that Jupiter's moon harbors life
