Photo: NASA .

On April 30, 2013, NASA signed a contract with Russia's Federal Space Agency, Roscosmos, hiring the Russians to ferry U.S. astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The terms of this contract : six astronauts to be ferried, over four years, at a cost of $70.7 million a head.

That's more than SpaceX charges to send up to 4.85 metric tons of cargo into space. It's a lot to pay to send up one 180-pound astronaut.

$70.7 million?! NASAPilotTony Antonelli seems to think that a mite pricey.Photo: NASA .

But there's good news for NASA, and for taxpayers -- and for investors, too. NASA has had it up to here with paying exorbitant taxi fares to the Russians. And pretty soon, we'll be sending our astronauts back to space on our own rocket ships, for much cheaper.

To the Moon, Alice! (Or at least to the ISS.) Last month, NASA held a joint conference with its two contractors building a private commercial American "space taxi" service to the ISS -- Boeing and SpaceX . It's dubbed the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability project, or CCtCap , and NASA's plan is to pay Boeing $4.2 billion and SpaceX $2.6 billion to develop and operate a fleet of space taxis to shuttle astronauts to and from ISS.

Specifically, beginning in 2017:

If all goes well, NASA estimates that the cost of sending an astronaut to ISS in an American rocket ship will fall by 18% from what Roscosmos is charging -- to as low as $58 million. But one presumes that this is an average of the cost of the two companies' efforts. Given that Boeing is charging NASA 61% more to send astronauts to ISS in its CST-100 capsule than SpaceX bid for its Dragon V2 capsule, it's entirely possible that some "tickets" to ISS could be even cheaper than the $58 million average.

What it means to investors This is all great news for taxpayers. But what does it mean for investors? Well, I see three main takeaways:

So what's the real upshot here? As NASA administrator Charles Bolden explained it, getting a commercial space taxi service set up here in America means we won't "ever, ever [have] to write another check to Roscosmos."

Here is the original post:

NASA to Russia: We Never Want to Write You Another Check