NASA Ends The Space Race for $6.8 Billion Contracts And Selects Boeing and SpaceX to Build Space Shuttles

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After more than three years of fierce competition between rival aerospace engineering companies, news today came from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida and ended the search for NASA's newest partners, as they announced the selection of aerospace leaders Boeing and new startup SpaceX to develop ferry spacecrafts to shuttle American astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

Planned to be completed by 2017, to begin ferrying American astronauts to the International Space Station, the Commercial Crew Program spearheaded by NASA will by a collaborative effort created and executed by Boeing and SpaceX who will work together to develop the rocketry and crew modules required. Worth a potential total of $6.8 billion over the course of the next few years of development, the contracts created fierce rivalry amongst leading companies vying for a piece of NASA's programs, however, with the selection of Boeing and new competitor SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk who also created PayPal, NASA hopes to blend innovative new technology with superb execution to ensure the safety of their crews.

Since the July 21, 2011 return of the Atlantis space shuttle, NASA has been under discussion within the Obama administration. As trips to the International Space Station became heavily reliant on Russian Soyuz capsules, and commercial space companies began competition with NASA for government contracts, promising innovation and lower overhead costs, the future of NASA has been uncertain. However, the announcement this morning, Tuesday Sept. 16, marks a major turning point for NASA and commercial collaborations that will undoubtedly vie for contracts in the future.

"This is the fulfillment of the commitment President Obama made to return human space flight launches to US soil and end our reliance on the Russians" NASA administrator Charles Bolden says.

According to Kathy Lueders, the Program Manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, the dual contracts issued between Boeing (for an estimated $4.2 billion) and SpaceX (for an estimated $2.6 billion) will allow NASA to ensure that they stay on target to meet their 2017 goal of manned spaceflights. And though the price tag may seem high to American tax payers, the price of ending reliance upon Russian vessels is one that NASA and the US government is quite willing to pay.

As of now, the US contract with Russia, which ensures that American astronauts can be ferried to the International Space Station, will end in November 2017 which places a rather stringent time frame on the collaborative project that Boeing and SpaceX must complete. However, as tensions rise between the US and Russia over territorial conflicts in the Ukraine and Crimea, the US government has sensed even greater urgency in issuing contracts and beginning the large project. Currently, as the Russian Space Agency charges $71 million per US astronaut taken to the International Space Station, NASA believes that though the initial costs seem large, that the savings in the long term will be well worth the efforts.