Commercial spaceflight has received the official seal of approval of the US government as Nasa teams up with Boeing and Elon Musk's privately owned SpaceX to assemble Launch America. This is an initiative that combines Nasa-trained commercial spaceflight crew including Suni Williams and Doug Hurley with SpaceX and Boeing resources that aim to "blaze a new trail – a trail that will one day land them in the history books and Americans on the surface of Mars," according to Nasa administrator Charles Bolden.

This is an interesting challenge to the Dutch non-profit foundation Mars One which recently saw its contract with US aerospace firm Lockheed Martin fall through while some volunteers have also dropped out of the one-way mission to the red planet.

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