As leadership departs, NASA quietly moves to buy more Soyuz seats

Enlarge / The Soyuz MS-03 spacecraft launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome with NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy of Roscosmos, and ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet on board in November. (credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)

NASA's commercial program holds much promise—the development of private vehicles to transport humans into low Earth orbit should eventually bring down spaceflight costs and broaden access to space. But as is often the case with new spacecraft development, both Boeing and SpaceX have faced technical problems with their capsules.

Publicly, NASA has maintained the hope that at least one private vehicle, either Boeing's Starliner or SpaceX's Crew Dragon, would be capable of operational missions by the end of 2017 or early 2018. But that no longer appears certain—or even likely. Meanwhile, NASA still has the International Space Station to maintain and must get its astronauts there through the only means possible. Back in 2015, anticipating delays with the commercial crew program, NASA purchased transport on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft through 2018. But that may not be long enough, the agency has decided.

Seats for 2019

Last September, based upon anonymous sources, Ars reported that NASA had begun considering buying additional seats in 2019 as a hedge against further delays with the commercial crew program. Both NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and the agency's head of human spaceflight, Bill Gerstenmaier, subsequently denied this report.