The Commercial Crew Program (CCP) is a NASA initiative that buys astronaut transportation to low Earth orbit as a service from private companies instead of operating a government-owned vehicle. Under fixed-price 2014 contracts, worth 2.6 billion dollars to SpaceX and 4.2 billion to Boeing,[10] SpaceX built the Crew Dragon capsule, launched on Falcon 9, and Boeing the CST-100 Starliner; Crew Dragon has flown 13 crewed missions to the International Space Station since May 2020.[1][3]

The program ended a nine-year period in which the United States could reach the station only by purchasing seats on Russia's Soyuz.[2] The 13 missions comprise the Demo-2 test flight and the Crew-1 through Crew-12 rotations, one of which (Crew-9) also brought Starliner's stranded test crew home.[3][4] Boeing has yet to begin operational crewed flights, and its next mission, Starliner-1, has been converted to an uncrewed cargo flight.[5]

Status as of August 2026

In August 2026 the Commercial Crew Program is flying entirely on SpaceX's Crew Dragon. The Crew-12 astronauts, launched on February 13 after Crew-11 came home a month early over a medical concern, are aboard the International Space Station, where Crew-12 commander Jessica Meir now leads Expedition 75; NASA introduced the next rotation, Crew-13, on August 3 and is targeting its launch for no earlier than September 12.[3][7][8][29] Boeing's Starliner remains uncertified for crew: its next flight, the uncrewed Starliner-1 cargo mission, is expected no earlier than the fourth quarter of 2026, and NASA declined to give a date at a July 30 briefing.[24] The Dragon fleet stands at five capsules; the fifth and last one SpaceX plans to build first flew in June 2025, and NASA has approved part of the fleet for up to 15 flights per capsule.[30] Citing SpaceX's position as the only certified provider, NASA said in May 2026 it would add up to six missions beyond Crew-14 to cover the station's remaining life.[13]

The post-Shuttle gap

NASA retired the Space Shuttle in July 2011, leaving Soyuz as the only route to the International Space Station for American, European, Japanese, and Canadian crews. The price NASA paid per Soyuz seat climbed from about 21 million dollars in 2006 to an average of nearly 80 million for the seats bought after 2017, and the last seat NASA purchased, used for an October 2020 flight, cost just over 90 million.[2][9] Reliance on a single vehicle also carried programmatic and geopolitical risk.[2]

Building on the commercial cargo model that had produced SpaceX's Dragon freighter, NASA structured commercial crew as a competition among private designs, with the government as anchor customer rather than owner.[1][2] The capability was originally expected around 2015. Congress appropriated less than NASA requested in the program's early years, which the agency said pushed the target to mid-2017; technical problems at both providers accounted for the rest of the slip to 2020.[2]

Development and contracts

NASA funded commercial crew development through successive competitive rounds: Commercial Crew Development awards in 2010 and 2011, the Commercial Crew Integrated Capability round of 2012, and the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contracts of September 2014, worth 4.2 billion dollars to Boeing and 2.6 billion dollars to SpaceX. Each contract covered certification, at least one crewed test flight, and between two and six operational missions, paid on fixed-price milestones.[1][10] The approach was cheap by the standards of NASA crew vehicles: a 2020 Planetary Society analysis put development spending at roughly 1.7 billion dollars for Crew Dragon and 2.8 billion for Starliner, in the neighborhood of Project Mercury and far below the inflation-adjusted cost of Gemini, Apollo, or the Shuttle.[11]

NASA has since extended SpaceX's contract to a total of 14 rotation missions. A 2022 modification added Crew-10 through Crew-14 for about 1.44 billion dollars, bringing SpaceX's contract to roughly 4.93 billion dollars and carrying the partnership toward the station's planned retirement around 2030.[12] In May 2026 the agency disclosed plans to add as many as six more missions beyond Crew-14, up to three of them ordered immediately, on the grounds that SpaceX remains the only NASA-certified crew transportation system.[13]

Crew Dragon operations

SpaceX flew Crew Dragon's uncrewed orbital test, Demo-1, in March 2019; the same capsule was destroyed a month later in a ground-test explosion of its SuperDraco abort engines, traced to a leaking check valve that SpaceX replaced with burst disks.[14] After an in-flight abort test in January 2020, Demo-2 carried NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the station on May 30, 2020, the first crewed orbital launch from US soil since 2011 and the first by a commercial spacecraft.[15][16] Certification followed that November, NASA's first human-rating of a new spacecraft since the Shuttle nearly 40 years earlier.[17]

MissionLaunchNotes
Demo-2May 2020Crewed flight test; Hurley and Behnken
Crew-1November 2020First operational rotation
Crew-2April 2021First crew on a reused booster and capsule
Crew-3November 2021Six-month rotation
Crew-4April 2022Six-month rotation
Crew-5October 2022First Russian cosmonaut on a US commercial vehicle
Crew-6March 2023First long-duration UAE astronaut
Crew-7August 2023Crew members from four space agencies
Crew-8March 2024Longest Dragon mission, about 235 days
Crew-9September 2024Flew with two empty seats for the Starliner test crew
Crew-10March 2025Relieved Crew-9 and the Starliner astronauts
Crew-11August 2025Returned early on January 15, 2026
Crew-12February 2026In progress; planned eight-month stay
Crew-13September 2026 (planned)Targeted for no earlier than September 12

Crew-11, with NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Michael Fincke, JAXA astronaut Kimiya Yui, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, launched on August 1, 2025. On January 8, 2026, NASA announced the mission would end early because of a medical concern involving one crew member; the agency withheld details for privacy and described the individual as stable.[6] NASA arranged additional evaluation on Earth, and Dragon splashed down in the Pacific off California on January 15, 167 days after launch.[7][18]

Crew-12 launched on February 13, 2026, carrying NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot, and cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev aboard the Dragon capsule Freedom, and docked the next day to begin a planned eight-month stay with the station's Expedition 74 crew.[8][19] The integrated crew reflects an ongoing seat-barter arrangement in which cosmonauts fly on Dragon while NASA astronauts fly on Soyuz.[8] Beyond NASA service, the same capsule design supports private orbital flights, an early segment of space tourism.

Crew-13 is next. NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov are assigned to a launch from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral targeted for no earlier than September 12, 2026; NASA counts it as the program's 13th rotation and 14th flight with astronauts.[3][20]

Boeing Starliner

Boeing's CST-100 Starliner has had a slower path than Crew Dragon. Its first uncrewed test in December 2019 was cut short by software and timer faults; a re-flight in May 2022 reached the station.[22] The Crew Flight Test (CFT) launched Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on June 5, 2024, but the spacecraft suffered helium leaks in its propulsion system and five aft thrusters dropped out during rendezvous. NASA kept the vehicle docked for weeks of testing, then decided in August 2024 that the astronauts would stay aboard the station rather than risk the ride home.[21] Starliner undocked and landed uncrewed at White Sands on September 7, 2024 (UTC); Wilmore and Williams returned with Crew-9 on March 18, 2025, after 286 days in orbit.[4][22]

Boeing and NASA spent 2025 testing thrusters at White Sands and redesigning thermal protection in the "doghouse" propulsion pods where overheating had degraded seals.[22] In November 2025 the agencies modified the contract: Starliner-1 will fly as an uncrewed cargo mission that doubles as a validation flight, and Boeing's mission count was cut from six to four, with the remaining three reserved for crewed rotations after certification.[5][23][24] The cargo flight was targeted for no earlier than April 2026, then June; by mid-2026 Boeing expected it no earlier than the fourth quarter of the year, and at a July 30 briefing NASA declined to name a date, saying the vehicle will fly when the remaining work is closed out and a docking port is available.[24] A crewed Starliner-2 rotation would follow only after the cargo flight succeeds and the vehicle is certified.[5][23]

Crew Dragon and Starliner compared

Crew Dragon and CST-100 Starliner won the program's two 2014 contracts; nearly twelve years on, one flies every NASA rotation and the other has yet to be certified for crew.[10][5]

Crew Dragon (SpaceX)CST-100 Starliner (Boeing)
2014 contract value2.6 billion dollars[10]4.2 billion dollars[10]
Launch vehicleFalcon 9Atlas V
First crewed flightDemo-2, May 30, 2020[16]Crew Flight Test, June 5, 2024[21]
NASA crew certificationNovember 2020[17]Not yet certified[5]
Estimated seat price (2019)About 55 million dollars[2]About 90 million dollars[2]
Crewed flights through August 202613[3]1[21]
Next flightCrew-13, no earlier than September 12, 2026[3]Starliner-1 uncrewed cargo, no earlier than fourth quarter 2026[24]

Seat prices and costs

NASA's Office of Inspector General calculated in November 2019 that a Crew Dragon seat costs about 55 million dollars and a Starliner seat about 90 million dollars, assuming four astronauts per flight, against an average of just under 80 million dollars for the Soyuz seats NASA bought after 2017.[2][25] The 2022 extension priced Crew-10 through Crew-14 at about 1.44 billion dollars for five four-seat missions, roughly 72 million dollars a seat.[12] Fixed-price contracting has kept NASA's exposure bounded; cost growth beyond the milestones falls on the providers, as Boeing shows: the company had charged about 2 billion dollars in losses against its Starliner contract by early 2025.[24]

After the space station

The Commercial Crew Program's horizon is set by the International Space Station itself, which NASA plans to retire around 2030.[26] SpaceX holds a June 2024 contract worth up to 843 million dollars to build the US Deorbit Vehicle, a heavily modified Dragon that will dock with the complex and steer it into the atmosphere over a remote stretch of ocean.[27] For the years after, NASA is funding commercially owned space stations and intends to buy transportation and research time on them as one customer among many, extending the purchasing model commercial crew pioneered.[26] Crew rotations to the ISS are contracted through the end of the decade, and the missions proposed in May 2026 are meant to cover the station's remaining life.[12][13]

Significance

The Commercial Crew Program restored independent US access to orbit and has kept the station continuously staffed with larger crews, expanding research time.[1][2] Its goal of two dissimilar transportation systems remains unfinished while Starliner awaits crew certification, but the service-contract model it proved has spread across NASA: the agency now buys lunar landers for the Artemis program, cargo deliveries, and coming commercial space stations the same way.[26][28] For SpaceX, the program supplied the funding and flight experience that made Dragon the mainstay of US human spaceflight in the 2020s, flying private missions alongside its NASA rotations.[3]

References

  1. Commercial Crew Program - Essentials - NASA.
  2. NASA's Management of Crew Transportation to the International Space Station (IG-20-005) - NASA Office of Inspector General, November 14, 2019.
  3. NASA's SpaceX Crew-13 - NASA.
  4. Back to Earth, Forward to the Future: NASA's SpaceX Crew-9 Returns - NASA.
  5. NASA, Boeing pivot Starliner-1 mission from 4-person astronaut flight to cargo-only - Spaceflight Now.
  6. NASA Shares Latest Update on International Space Station Operations - NASA, January 8, 2026.
  7. NASA's SpaceX Crew-11 Mission Returns, Splashes Down off California - NASA, January 15, 2026.
  8. NASA's SpaceX Crew-12 Launches to International Space Station - NASA.
  9. NASA uses final purchased Soyuz seat for Wednesday flight to station - Spaceflight Now.
  10. NASA Chooses American Companies to Transport U.S. Astronauts to International Space Station - NASA.
  11. NASA's Commercial Crew Program is a great deal for the agency - The Planetary Society.
  12. NASA Awards SpaceX More Crew Flights to Space Station - NASA.
  13. NASA to add missions to SpaceX commercial crew contract - SpaceNews, May 24, 2026.
  14. SpaceX points to leaky valve as culprit in Crew Dragon test accident - Spaceflight Now.
  15. NASA, SpaceX Complete Final Major Flight Test of Crew Spacecraft - NASA.
  16. NASA Astronauts Launch from America in Historic Test Flight of SpaceX Crew Dragon - NASA.
  17. NASA Certifies First Commercial Human Spaceflight System - NASA Commercial Crew blog.
  18. Crew-11 lands after medical situation forces early return - NASASpaceflight.com.
  19. What You Need to Know About NASA's SpaceX Crew-12 Mission - NASA.
  20. NASA Sets Briefings for SpaceX Crew-13 Mission to Space Station - NASA.
  21. NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth Without Crew - NASA.
  22. NASA, Boeing still working on Starliner return to flight - SpaceNews.
  23. NASA, Boeing Modify Starliner Contract: Fewer Launches, Cargo Only on Starliner-1 - SpacePolicyOnline.com.
  24. Still No Date for Starliner's Next Flight - SpacePolicyOnline.com.
  25. Here's How Much NASA Is Paying Per Seat on SpaceX's Crew Dragon and Boeing's Starliner - Space.com.
  26. Commercial Space Stations - NASA.
  27. NASA awards SpaceX contract for space station deorbit vehicle - SpaceNews, June 2024.
  28. Human Landing Systems - NASA.
  29. Spacewalk Preps, Health Research on Station as NASA Introduces SpaceX Crew-13 - NASA space station blog, August 3, 2026.
  30. SpaceX to debut its fifth and final Crew Dragon spacecraft on Axiom Mission 4 - Spaceflight Now, June 10, 2025.