CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Thursday 16 December 2010 7 pm EST
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Virgin Galactic, an offshoot of the U.S. Group of Richard Branson Virgin, was joined by two separate teams for 200 million NASA program $ stimulate the development of the private sector space taxi, the company said Thursday.
Teams, led by Orbital Sciences Corporation and of Sierra Nevada Corp., both offer passenger flights on reusable winged vessels as expendable rockets launch and land on runways such as the space shuttle NASA.
These drawings "could revolutionize orbital spaceflight in much the same way that SpaceShipTwo has revolutionized suborbital flights into space," Virgin said in a statement, referring to the first of a fleet of suborbital commercial spacecraft developed by Scaled Composites.
Built scale prototype SpaceShipOne, who won a prize of $ 10 million in 2004 to make the first private sector financed by human astronauts.
Virgin sells tickets to mount the SpaceShipTwo six passengers, two pilots, named Enterprise, $ 200,000 and plans to begin flight services about a year.
Society has collected more than 54 million in deposits of 400 clients, Virgin Galactic said.
Orbital at least four companies competing for the next round of funding from NASA and the Sierra Nevada commercial personal development program.
Program would provide a U.S. alternative flight of astronauts aboard the international space station in addition to the Russian Soyuz capsules after the space shuttle is retired in 2011.
Other bidders include technologies for space exploration or SpaceX and Boeing. Private SpaceX December 8 steals successfully the dragon capsule which supports NASA pursuant to a separate development effort cargo version.
Orbital has a similar agreement with NASA for a capsule of Cygnus carrying cargoes, supposed to debut next year.
SpaceX is considering upgrading Dragon for passengers with the addition of a system to escape launch and other improvements. Orbital provides a completely different spacecraft, are not yet named, and the Launcher.
NASA provides select two or more projects for funding in March. Agency, which takes its retired his three space shuttles next year due to higher operating costs and ongoing security concerns, has begun efforts to develop commercial crew with 50 million went to five companies, including the Sierra Nevada and Boeing stimulus funds.
The deadline for the submission of the proposals was Monday. NASA not proposals said how much he had received.
(Editing by Jane Sutton and Xavier Briand)
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