Southern California-based SpaceX and Boeing were selected by NASA Tuesday to transport astronauts to the International Space Station.
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden named the winners at a late-afternoon news conference at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. News regarding the contacts totaling $6.8 billion had been eagerly anticipated for weeks.
The deal will end NASA's expensive reliance on Russia. U.S. astronauts have been riding Russian rockets ever since NASA's shuttles retired in 2011. The latest price tag is $71 million per seat.
NASA has set a goal of 2017 for the first launch under the commercial crew program. Both companies will use crew capsules and launches will originate from Cape Canaveral.
Boeing earned the bulk of the NASA contract, at $4.2 billion for the development of its CST-100 spacecraft. Hawthorne-based SpaceX was awarded a $2.6 billion contract that will be used for its Dragon spacecraft.
"Our specialist teams have watched the development of these new spacecraft during earlier development phases, and are confident they will meet the demands of these important missions," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said Tuesday. "We are also confident they will be safe for NASA astronauts -- to achieve NASA certification in 2017, they must meet the same rigorous safety standards we had for the space shuttle program."
Billionaire Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp. -- SpaceX for short -- became the first private company to launch a spacecraft into orbit and retrieve it in 2010. The SpaceX Dragon capsule made its first space station trip, with astronaut supplies, in 2012.
The company's cargo carrier has been modified to carry as many as seven astronauts. It's known as Dragon v2 -- version two.
