The Commercial Space Freighters will be designed to support near earth space transportation requirements, provide the capability for deep space exploration, support mankind's need to obtain deep space resources, and establish populated safe havens in deep space. Affordable and sustainable space transportation for the 21st century must be based on commercially operated reusable launchers and space based vehicles. This requires a space transportation system that has the capability to return commercial quantities of near-earth and deep space resources to the Earth's surface…a commercial space shuttle (CSS) freighter. The CSS freighter using the decommissioned space shuttle's configuration reduces the mission cost to $205 million; however there are many existing technologies that can reduce the freighter's operational cost to a profitable level for commercial enterprises.
The CSS freighter uses the orbiter airframe profile and will be autonomously operated. Passengers will be flown only on missions requiring their presence. For these missions, they will be provided escape pods which provides protection for launch, on-orbit, and entry anomalies. Launch pad assembly of the freighter will reduce operations cost and turnaround time. Rapid turn-around is a unique CSS freighter feature which reduces operation's cost, provides the capability for timely intercepts of threating asteroids/comets, and supports USAF rapid deploy missions.
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