NASA Tentatively Approves Plan for Private Spaceship to Visit Space Station

An artist's illustration of SpaceX's Dragon space capsule in Earth orbit. (Image credit: SpaceX)

NASA and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) “technically have agreed” to combine the two remaining flights designed to prove the Hawthorne, Calif., company can deliver cargo to the International Space Station, but formal approval for the mission is still pending, a senior NASA official said.

“We technically have agreed with SpaceX that we want to combine those flights,” William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, said at a July 21 media briefing at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “We are doing all the planning to go ahead and have those missions combined, but we haven’t given them formal approval yet.”

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