Under its Flight Opportunities Program, NASA has selected seven companies to provide suborbital flight services to the agency. Winners include Armadillo Aerospace, Near Space Corp., Masten Space Systems, Up Aerospace Inc., Virgin Galactic, Whittinghill Aerospace, and XCOR, but the commercial space flight industry is happy as well.

Each vendor gets a two year IDIQ (indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity) contract with the total combine value of the contracts worth $10 million. NASA now has a pool of commercial space companies to deliver payload integration and flight services to fly a variety of experiments for NASA's research and technology needs.

"Through this catalog approach, NASA is moving toward the goal of making frequent, low-cost access to near-space available to a wide range of engineers, scientists and technologists," said NASA Chief Technologist Bobby Braun in an agency press release. "The government's ability to open the suborbital research frontier to a broad community of innovators will enable maturation of the new technologies and capabilities needed for NASA's future missions in space."

The Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF) and winning vendors were quick to roll out a press release praising the contract awards and NASA's Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research (CRuSR) program.

“This is a big day for commercial space," Commercial Spaceflight Federation Executive Director John Gedmark said. "Just as 1920s air mail purchases helped jumpstart the airline industry, we expect that NASA’s purchases of flights on commercial suborbital vehicles will help accelerate this new industry. Hundreds of scientists, engineers, and educators have attended CSF workshops on the topic of using commercial suborbital vehicles, and we are thrilled to see that the R&D community will now be able to get rides to space.”

Four of the winners are currently based out of the California Mojave Air and Space Port: XCOR, Masten Space Systems, Virgin Galactic and Whittinghill Aerospace LLC, notes Bakersfield.com. However, Virgin Galactic will conduct suborbital operations of Spaceport America in New Mexico while Masten will conduct demo flights of its vehicle out of LC-36 in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Up Aerospace, one of the "newcomers" to the suborbital catalog, conducts operations out of Spaceport America while Near Space Corp. uses a "Tactical Balloon Launch System" to loft 15 kilogram payloads up to 30 kilometers for multiple hours or days at a time.

Earlier this year, NASA announced it had selected Armadillo and Masten to provide four suborbital flights for microgravity experiments, with flights to take place earlier this year.

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