Under NASA’s CCP, SpaceX received $3.1 billion to fund the development of the Crew Dragon capsule. Their competitor, Boeing, received a $4.8 billion contract to develop the Starliner. In comparison, it’s estimated that NASA’s inflation-adjusted costs were $900 billion through 2011 when the space shuttle program ended.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is a game-changer
In his 2017 Congressional testimony, Elon Musk, SpaceX founder and visionary, suggested that the NASA Space Act Agreement, which allows NASA to contract with outside agencies and private companies, was responsible for “setting only a high-level requirement for cargo transport to the space station [while] leaving the details to industry.”
On this basis, SpaceX was able to design and develop both Falcon 9 rockets on its own. And the result was a substantially lower cost.
NASA’s own independently verified numbers estimated SpaceX’s total development cost for the Falcon rockets at $390 million dollars for both. In 2011, NASA estimated that it would have cost the agency about $4 billion to develop a rocket like the Falcon 9 booster based upon NASA’s traditional contracting processes, about 10 times more.
