NASA names recipients of commercial crew development awards

New York Times : Four winners were chosen from 22 proposals for NASA’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) 2 awards: Boeing received the largest award of $92.3 million; Sierra Nevada Corp, $80 million; Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX), $75 million; and Blue Origin, $22 million. The awards are designed to promote the development of commercially operated transport systems to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. “We’re committed to safely transporting US astronauts on American-made spacecraft and ending the outsourcing of this work to foreign governments,” NASA administrator Charles Bolden said in a prepared statement. “These agreements are significant milestones in NASA’s plans to take advantage of American ingenuity to get to low-Earth orbit, so we can concentrate our resources on deep space exploration.”