SpaceX Gets Huge Contract for its First Manned Space Flight
NASA confirmed that the private space company will send astronauts to the International Space Station.
SpaceX hit a big milestone on Friday with NASAconfirming on Friday that the Elon Musk-led space cargo business will launch astronauts to the International Space Station by 2017.
Last year, the space agency tentatively awarded a $2.6 billion contract to SpaceX to carry crew to space. NASA’s announcement on Friday formalizes the deal, which involves SpaceX loading its Crew Dragon spacecraft with astronauts and sending them beyond the stratosphere.
NASA goal is to wean the country’s space program from its dependence on Russia for sending astronauts into orbit. The space agency plans to award two more private contracts for manned flights to the space station sometime in the future.
Prior to the SpaceX contract, NASA gave a $4.2 billion contract to Boeing BA 0.11% for shuttling astronauts to the International Space Station.
“It’s really exciting to see SpaceX and Boeing with hardware in flow for their first crew rotation missions,” Kathy Lueders, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said in a statement. “It is important to have at least two healthy and robust capabilities from U.S. companies to deliver crew and critical scientific experiments from American soil to the space station throughout its lifespan.”
NASA has yet to decide whether Boeing or SpaceX will be the first to blast off to the International Space Station. Absent the necessary funding by the U.S. government, the space agency said it would have to postpone the commercial spacecraft missions.
NASA said that SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft and its related rocket passed the initial design reviews and certifications to proceed to the next level of testing, which is needed to show that the spacecraft is safe enough to carry astronauts. The space agency said that a standard mission consists of flying four astronauts to the space station, where they would remain for 210 days.
This is a big deal for SpaceX because it previously only launched unmanned spacecraft to the space station to transport supplies. This summer, one of SpaceX’s unmanned spacecraft exploded en route to the space station.
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More Than Half of Americans Now Watch Netflix
A slight majority of Americans now watch the streaming service, according to a new survey.
Movie-streaming service Netflix is now used by more than half of Americans to watch movies and television shows, according to a recent survey by RBC Capital Markets.
The survey found that 51% of Americans said they use Netflix NFLX 3.01% to stream content, far more than alternatives like YouTube, HBO Go, Hulu, and Amazon AMZN 1.09% , according to Quartz, which published the findings.
Of course, Netflix is much different than YouTube, its nearest rival. Netflix features professionally produced movies, television shows, and original content like the popular series House of Cards. YouTube, in contrast, is with user-produced cat videos and skateboarding stunts mixed with music videos and Hollywood studio productions—both free and for rent.
Netflix’s original content has played a big role in its gaining traction overseas. Nearly 52% of respondents in France and 64% in Germany said they’ve already watched House of Cards. However, Netflix’s comedies tend to not be as popular overseas, the survey noted. Only 8% of French respondents and 10% in Germany said they’ve watchedUnbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, a new Netflix comedy series compared with 26% in the U.S.
As of the end of September, Netflix said it had 43 million U.S. subscribers and another 26 million internationally.
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Merck CEO Blasts Company that Raised Drug Prices 5,000%
He had harsh words for some fellow pharma executives.
Don’t mistake Turing Pharmaceuticals, the drug company that raised the price a life-saving treatment by more than 5,000% in August, for the whole of the pharmaceutical industry, said Merck & Co. CEO Kenneth Frazier.
“Turing is not the market,” said Frazier. “The CEO spooled up manufacturing in a case where other people left the market. This is a hedge fund guy masquerading as a pharma exec.”
Frazier, one of the few pharmaceutical CEOs to speak publicly (and bluntly) against Turing CEO Martin Shkreli, made the comments in discussion with four other executives from across the health care industry as part of the Health and Human Services Pharmaceutical Forum Friday. With that comment, Frazier was trying to draw a clear line between the drug companies that have come under pressure recently for skyrocketing prices, including Turing and Valeant Pharmaceuticals VRX 8.33% , and other big name pharma companies that are working to create innovative new drugs.
He and Express Scripts’ senior vice president Steve Miller and Kaiser Permanente’s CEO Bernard Tyson, discussed how each of their companies are trying to address soaring drug costs and help patients receive the best care possible. Each executive agreed that it comes down to outcomes, but finding the best way to measure results is less clear.
“We’re, as an industry, going to have to try a tremendous number of experiments to figure this out,” said Miller, who also serves as chief medical officer for Express Scripts.
And each organization is doing just that.
Express Scripts ESRX 1.29% is introducing a program next year to test indication-based pricing for cancer treatments, a method for which he credits Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Peter Bach. The program would adjust the price based on how well the drug performs: the more better the outcome, the more a company can charge for the medicine.
For example, cancer drug Tarceva can extend a lung cancer patient’s life by an average of 5.2 months, whereas the same drug will extend a pancreatic cancer patient’s life by an average of only 12 days. In any other industry, argued Miller, you wouldn’t pay the same for something that works one tenth as well—and that’s exactly what the indication-based pricing is meant to solve. It would adjust the price each of those patients pay to reflect the effectiveness.
Merck MRK -0.33% is also trying its own pilot to adjust for value in partnership with Cigna CI 3.40% . It is incentivizing Cigna to implement programs that help diabetes patients better adhere to their medication regimens and, ultimately, help better control their disease. If Cigna succeeds by making patients healthier, Merck will give the insurer a higher rebate.
These initiatives are the tip of the iceberg. The executives aren’t sure how these programs will pan out, the group agreed, but making sure patients can afford life-saving drugs is vital to the industry’s survival.
“Treating everyone is the right thing to do,” said Miller. “If Jonas Salk had priced the polio vaccine like we see today, we’d still have polio. We need better pricing, and we need people out there engaging patients and getting them treated.”
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