NASA planned to announced which one or two private companies wins the right to transport astronauts to the International Space Station on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.
The announcement will be made by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden at the Kennedy Space Center, next door to where the launches should occur in a few years, the AP reported. The deal will end NASA's expensive reliance on Russian crew transport.
The three contenders include SpaceX of California, already delivering space station cargo; Sierra Nevada Corp., which is developing a mini-shuttle in Colorado; and Boeing, the veteran of the group that would assemble its crew capsules at Kennedy, according to the AP. Since NASA's space shuttles retired in 2011, American astronauts have been riding Russian rockets.
The current price is $71 million per seat and NASA has at least four of its own astronauts flying up on a Russian Soyuz to the space station every year, according to the AP. NASA has set a 2017 deadline for the first crew launch under the program.
Billionaire Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX for short, became the first private company to launch a spacecraft into orbit and retrieve it in 2010, the AP reported. The SpaceX Dragon capsule made its first space station trip with astronaut supplies in 2012.
While SpaceX is proud of its cargo deliveries, "the company was not founded to bring T-shirts and food and water up to space, it was founded to bring people into space," program manager Garrett Reisman, a former space station astronaut, told an industry conference late last month, according to the AP.
NASA paid each three major contenders hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years to spur development and the new contracts are worth billions, the AP reported. .
