Nasa Planning Space Taxi

In a $500 million project, NASA is planning to build another new spaceship for the year 2001: an emergency lifeboat for the International Space Station that could possibly double as a small space taxi.

After two years of quiet testing and study at Johnson Space Center in Houston, the space agency on Friday revealed its plan in an advertisement looking for aerospace companies to help develop the spaceship, dubbed X-38.

The ship is designed to be an emergency crew-return vehicle for the soon-to-be-built space station, NASA spokesman James Hartsfield said. But NASA is also talking with the French space agency and the European Space Agency about taking the basic design and expanding it into a crew-transport ship. A decision on the larger version will not be made until next year.

“It might be an efficient way of going about the whole project to go at dual purposes,” Hartsfield said Friday.

A crew transporter would only carry people. If the shuttle is a space moving van, the X-38 could be like a space taxi, Hartsfield said. It would fit three astronauts when used as a taxi and could fly for 80 hours.