Scott Audette/Reuters
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket sitting on the launching pad on Monday at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Without fanfare, without crowds of curious spectators, the future of the United States’ space program sits on a launching pad here.
The rocket, a Falcon 9 built by Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, for short, is unassuming — a runt compared to NASA’s space shuttles. It is scheduled to lift off on Wednesday morning and place into orbit an empty capsule, designed to carry cargo and eventually astronauts, which will circle the Earth twice before splashing down in the Pacific. The mission is to last less than three and a half hours.
Although the flight lacks in theatrics, it marks a major shift in the space program toward private industry. It is the first demonstration flight under a National Aeronautics and Space Administration contract that is to lead to SpaceX’s ferrying supplies to the International Space Station.
NASA, under a new space exploration blueprint signed into law in October, will now embark on a similar strategy for sending astronauts to orbit — buying rides from commercial companies rather than operating its own rocket.
Few details have been revealed about the so-called commercial crew program, but the earlier cargo program, started in 2006, demonstrates some of the promise of greater bang for the buck. During a news conference on Monday, Philip McAlister, acting director of commercial spaceflight development at NASA, pointed to the $253 million NASA paid SpaceX so far for development of the Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule and to the four years that it took to reach the first demonstration flight — cheaper and quicker than previous rocket programs.
“Both of those things are remarkable,” Mr. McAlister said at the news conference, “and an anomaly in terms of any historical development that I’m aware of, in terms of a traditional NASA development.”
The hope is that the commercial crew program, with NASA likely to invest several billion dollars over the next six years, will enlist companies like SpaceX to drive down the cost of space travel and allow NASA to devote its limited budget to more ambitious missions to send astronauts farther out into the solar system.
The cargo program also offers reason for caution because companies do not always meet their lofty predictions.
The program ran into an almost immediate speed bump when one of the two companies NASA chose, Rocketplane Kistler, could not raise the money it needed. NASA canceled Kistler’s contract the following year and had to run a second competition, which was won by the Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va.
SpaceX has been able to meet 17 of the 22 milestones in its contract, but took twice as long as it expected to do so. When it signed its contract in 2006, it predicted that it would get the first demonstration flight off in 2008.
Because of the fixed-price contract, NASA did not pay extra, but SpaceX had to seek additional financing from investors. Fixed-price contracts save taxpayers money if a company eventually completes its obligations, but waste time and money if the company fails like Kistler did. Orbital, which has received $155 million for meeting 15 of 21 milestones, is aiming for a demonstration flight late next year and beginning its cargo deliveries early in 2012.
NASA has also already paid the two companies an additional $333 million under the cargo delivery contracts.
NASA officials have also begun hedging their bets, saying that one additional space shuttle flight is needed to carry up supplies before the shuttles are retired next year. The extra supplies would provide a buffer in case the schedules of SpaceX and Orbital slip. “That gives us a little bit of margin there to make sure that station isn’t in dire circumstances before the commercial providers come fully online,” said William H. Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations.
Without the extra flight, the space station would start running short of supplies in 2012. Congress has authorized the extra flight, but NASA’s budget for 2011 has not yet been completed.
Even success in the cargo program does not assure success in carrying astronauts. Launching people into orbit is more complex and expensive, and a worry is that NASA’s exacting standards to make spaceflight as safe as possible would place expensive and onerous conditions on the companies.
Douglas R. Cooke, associate administrator of NASA’s exploration systems mission directorate, which is running the commercial crew and cargo development programs, said that a draft of the human rating standards required of the commercial companies the same 1-in-1,000 chance of a fatal accident during launching that NASA’s Ares I rocket and Orion capsule sought to meet.
Perhaps more important, the path to making a profitable business out of sending a crew into space remains unclear. A commercial market has existed for decades for the launching of satellites; for example, SpaceX has already signed a $492 million contract with Iridium Communications Inc. to launch Iridium’s next-generation communication satellites.
But NASA’s commercial crew needs might be as few as two flights a year, and no definite market beyond that yet exists for the flights, which will cost at least tens of millions of dollars per seat. John Elbon, vice president for commercial crew transportation at Boeing, which is also interested in bidding for the NASA business, said Boeing’s analysis showed that the NASA business would probably be enough to be profitable. But it is the potential of the other markets, like space tourism or private space stations, that make it much more attractive.
With Congress looking to rein in costs across the federal government, however, the commercial crew program might be squeezed even before it gets into full swing. President Obama had originally sought $6 billion over five years. Mr. Cooke said that NASA was looking at whether it could make do with half as much, $3 billion. “We’re looking at different options like that,” he said.
A US soldier prepares to fire the XM-25 
The XM-25 is already being used by US soldiers in Afghanistan 
