Matching Russian rides to the International Space Station after the space shuttle retires will be difficult without “extraordinary” US government help, a senior NASA insider said on Thursday. But the private space firm SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, says it is ready to step into the breach by undercutting the current $50 million-per-astronaut round-trip ticket for travelling to the ISS aboard the Russian Soyuz craft.

“We can guarantee crew flights to the ISS for less than $50 million a seat,” SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell told a hearing held by the US Senate committee on commerce, science and transportation.

If the shuttle retires as planned later this year, Russia’s three-person Soyuz capsules will be the only way to reach the ISS. The White House hopes that private companies will eventually offer rides to the space station and aims to spend $6 billion over the next five years to help them do so.

But on Thursday the senators heard doubts about whether suitable vehicles will be commercially viable and whether they could compete with the price of Soyuz seats, which are currently offered for about $50 million – the price that SpaceX promised to beat.


“How much it is subsidised we can’t tell, but it will be very difficult to match their price,” retired astronaut Thomas Stafford said on Thursday at the hearing.

Fair price

“[It is] a difficult case to make that this will be a commercially successful vehicle without extraordinary participation from the US government,” said Malcolm Peterson, a former NASA comptroller.

“Our fair price is going to have to be an amalgam of our national interest in the venture and however we want to parse the value of being able to create a commercially viable vehicle.” Peterson said he would be surprised if a private US version of Soyuz would cost less than $400 million per launch. For a three-seater, that would be more than twice as expensive as the Russian modules.

Although SpaceX says it can undercut the Russians, Frank Culbertson from Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Virginia, which has a contract with NASA to develop vehicles to carry cargo to the ISS, suggested the cost of a Soyuz-like mission would probably be $300 or $400 million.

With NASA’s Constellation programme axed and the US private sector not yet ready to get the nation’s astronauts into space, Shotwell said that the US should worry about its reliance on Soyuz: “After the shuttle is retired, it is not apparent what price Russia may demand for rides to the American-built portion of the ISS,” she said.