The founder of commercial spacecraft company SpaceX, which has successfully sent unmanned supply craft to the International Space Station, has unveiled the company's latest spacecraft intended to take astronauts into low-Earth orbit.
SpaceX's CEO Elon Musk claims the company's Dragon V2 spacecraft will bring down the cost of voyaging into space.
The bullet-shaped craft has extendable landing legs and a propulsion arrangement intended to let the Dragon V2 land on almost any surface "with the accuracy of a helicopter," Musk said during the unveiling at the company's Hawthorne, Calif., headquarters.
Its ability to accomplish soft landings almost anywhere would allow quick reloading and speedy preparation for another mission, he said.
"You can just reload, propel it and fly again. This is extremely important for revolutionizing access to space because as long as we continue to throw away rockets and space crafts, we will never truly have access to space," he said, noting many current rockets and space craft are unusable after returning to Earth in a fireball created by their trip through Earth's atmosphere.
"It'll always be incredibly expensive," using such craft, he said. "If an aircraft is thrown away with each flight, nobody will be able to fly, or very few (can)."
SpaceX is one of several companies working to provide space mission capabilities for NASA, which since the retirement of its space shuttle fleet in 2011 has had to depend on hitching rides on Russian spacecraft to take American astronauts into space, at the cost of almost $71 million per ticket.
NASA's Commercial Crew Program, intended to convey space crews to the ISS in 2017, is providing funding for the development of the Dragon V2, as well as to programs of other commercial space companies.
Progress has been slow in part because Congress has yet to fully fund the budget request for the project submitted by the space agency.
The SpaceX craft is designed to transport both crew, situated in a two-level seating system, and supplies to the ISS.
The cone-shaped front end of the craft can be opened to allow for direct docking with the space station under control of the crew aboard the Dragon V2.
The company's Dragon unmanned cargo spacecraft have already made four supply trips to the orbiting science outpost, the most recent returning completed science experiments along with obsolete equipment to a safe splashdown in the Pacific in April.
