Liberty completes commercial crew development agreement with NASA

ATK (NYSE: ATK), the company leading the development of the Liberty commercial spacecraft, has been successful in reaching the last milestone under the company's unfunded Space Act Agreement (SAA) with NASA for the Commercial Crew Development Program (CCDev-2).

The Liberty Rocket is a commercial crew space system with ATK as main contractor.

Astrium-EADS and Lockheed Martin also serve as sub-contractors.

The first unmanned test flights are forecast to begin in 2014, with crewed flights being planned for 2015. Liberty hopes it will be able to take NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) from 2016 onwards.

The Program Status Review (PSR) was the milestone in the Commercial Crew Development Program (CCDev-2) in which the Liberty team submitted a detailed progress report to NASA.

This included a flight test plan, system safety review, software status, system requirements and the integrated master schedule. ATK have previously completed five milestones.

Read the full article here: Liberty agreement with NASA