With the 46th anniversary of humanity's first steps on the surface of the Moon 11 days away, NASA has announced the names of the astronauts that could be the first to fly into space aboard commercially-produced spacecraft. The quartet will now prepare to do something NASA has lacked the capability to do since the end of the Shuttle Program in 2011 – fly to low-Earth orbit (LEO).
Each of the four astronauts selected has already traveled to orbit at least once. They include Robert Behnken, Eric Boe, Douglas Hurley, and Sunita Williams. Each will work with Boeing and SpaceX, the two companies producing private spacecraft to travel to and from the International Space Station (ISS ).
SpaceX is currently working to prepare a crewed version of their Dragon spacecraft while Boeing is developing its Commercial Space Transportation (CST-100) capsule. It is hoped that these two vehicles will be ready to fly by 2017.
[Also Covered By]: Popular Science, Universe Today
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2015, @09:11PM
So these will be "astronauts" the same way employees of
BlackwaterXeAcademiEric Prince are soldiers?(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 10 2015, @09:17PM
Nope, they will be doing NASA missions in private spacecraft.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday July 10 2015, @09:21PM
love the closing tag failure propagating through all the comments. and the footer.
NCommander, we need a bit of input sanitizing :)
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 10 2015, @09:22PM
I turned on the bat signal
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday July 10 2015, @09:47PM
Most tags are sanitized. No idea why the strike one isn't but it'll be taken care of shortly. Until then, well, I know better than to ask you lot not to exploit it but please don't anyway.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.