NASA, SpaceX and Boeing will host a news conference Monday (Jan. 26) to update the public on the progress of the space agency's commercial crew program. You can watch the press event live on Space.com.
Under NASA's commercial crew program, Boeing and SpaceX are expected to fly NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station from U.S. soil for the first time since the end of the space shuttle program in 2011. The crewed missions are expected to begin sometime in 2017. Watch the commercial crew update webcast live on Space.com via NASA TV starting at 12 p.m. EST (1700 GMT) Monday. Participants in the briefing include:
- NASA Administrator Charles Bolden
- Johnson Space Center Director Ellen Ochoa
- Commercial Crew Program Manager Kathy Lueders
- Vice President and General Manager of Boeing Space Exploration John Elbon
- President and Chief Operating Officer of SpaceX Gwynne Shotwell
- NASA astronaut Mike Fincke
Boeing will get $4.2 billion from NASA under the $6.8 billion Commercial Crew Transportation Capability award (CCtCap) announced in 2014. CCtCap is only the most recent in a series of awards put into place in 2010 to create new, private systems to ferry astronauts to and from the space station. SpaceX will receive $2.6 billion under CCtCap. SpaceX's Dragon V2 spaceship and Boeing's CST-100 capsule are each designed to carry seven astronauts to orbit. [SpaceX's Manned Dragon Spaceship in Pictures]
Follow Miriam Kramer @mirikramer. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
