S-550
proposed crewed spacecraft
The S-550 was a proposed crewed space capsule, designed in 2005–06 at Venturer Aerospace, in response to the NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program to provide commercial resupply and logistics support for the International Space Station after the retirement of the Space Shuttle.
It was an outgrowth of earlier Venturer Aerospace crewed capsule research and development projects.
NASA did not select the design for further funded development, and the company has not to date proceeded to develop the vehicle with private funding. Venturer Aerospace did not participate in the second COTS program round in 2007.
Description
The S-550 capsule was intended to carry up to six people (normally 2 or 3) and significant internal and external cargo on resupply missions to the International Space Station (ISS). Unlike the other COTS competitors, the S-550 capsule was explicitly a human-operated vehicle - while it had automated flight functions, it was intended to be flown with crews for any space station mission, with the crew in control for all rendezvous and dockings with ISS.
Design
The overall vehicle was design was for a 3.0 m (10 ft)-diameter ballistic capsule, weighing 7,500 kilograms (16,500 lb) including payloads. The capsule was projected to weigh 3,059 kg (6,744 lb) "wet" (with 2 crew and consumables, but not cargo), the service module 1,755 kg (3,869 lb) "wet" including rocket propellants, and 2,300 kg (5,100 lb) of internal cargo or passengers within the capsule. Additional mass in external unpressurized cargo could be obtained with increased launch vehicle capacity beyond 7,500 kg or by trading off internal cargo for external cargo.
Capsule shape
The S-550 capsule is a sphere-cone type lifting ballistic space capsule, similar to the shape of the film capsule reentry modules in the Corona spy satellite, but much larger. The general shape was also used by COTS competitor T/Space's CXV capsule.
“S-550” enters the record as proposed crewed spacecraft. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what S-550, proposed and crewed can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7387044. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2005 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “S-550” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.