{"id":239382,"date":"2026-06-20T14:15:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-20T19:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/the-international-space-station-orbits-earth-roughly-every-90-minutes-yet-for-years-no-american-spacecraft-could-reach-it-a-gap-a-single-private-company-stepped-in-to-close"},"modified":"2026-06-20T14:15:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T19:15:00","slug":"the-international-space-station-orbits-earth-roughly-every-90-minutes-yet-for-years-no-american-spacecraft-could-reach-it-a-gap-a-single-private-company-stepped-in-to-close","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/the-international-space-station-orbits-earth-roughly-every-90-minutes-yet-for-years-no-american-spacecraft-could-reach-it-a-gap-a-single-private-company-stepped-in-to-close","title":{"rendered":"The International Space Station orbits Earth roughly every 90 minutes, yet for years no American spacecraft could reach it \u2014 a gap a single private company stepped in to close"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/MJPjNITL-CQ?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>When the Space Shuttle retired in July 2011, the United States lost the ability to reach the very space station it had built \u2014 and for nearly nine years, American astronauts hitched rides on Russian Soyuz capsules at up to $90 million per seat. Then a private company that had failed its first three rockets quietly closed the gap.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When the Space Shuttle retired in July 2011, the United States lost the ability to reach the very space station it had built \u2014 and for nearly nine years, American astronauts hitched rides on Russian Soyuz capsules at up to $90 million per seat. Then a private company that had failed its first three rockets [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-239382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239382\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}