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NASA Awards Space Contract To Boeing and SpaceX

CAPE CANAVERAL (CBSMiami/AP) - NASA chose Boeing and SpaceX to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station within the next few years.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden announced the winners at a news conference on Tuesday at the Kennedy Space Center.

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The new deal will end NASA's heavy and expensive reliance on Russia.

Since shutting down shuttles in 2011, NASA has been paying Russia over $70 million per seat for each astronaut it sends up. NASA has at least four of its own astronauts flying up on a Russian Soyuz, to the space station, every year.

NASA is paying $4.2 billion to Boeing and $2.6 billion to SpaceX, hoping the companies can launch on their target date of 2017.

The third major contender, Sierra Nevada Corp., was developing a mini-shuttle in Colorado.

Boeing, the veteran of the competitors, would assemble its crew capsules at Kennedy. The new California-based SpaceX is already delivering supplies to the space station; its crew capsule is a version of its cargo carrier.

The commercial crew program follows the successful cargo delivery effort underway for the past two years, also under NASA contract.

The objective, for years, has been for NASA to hand space station flights to private companies and focus on getting astronauts into true outer space, with destinations such as asteroids and Mars. NASA is prepping its first-ever Orion space exploration capsule for a test flight in December.

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 Dragon cargo carrier has been enhanced to carry as many as seven astronauts. It's known as Dragon v2 — version two.

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.

Boeing's entry was also a capsule, called CST-100. The letters stand for Crew Space Transportation, and the number refers to 100 kilometers or 62 miles, the official start of space.

Sierra Nevada had the most novel entry, a winged, lifting body vehicle strongly reminiscent of NASA's space shuttle. Its name: Dream Chaser.

Both the CST-100 and Dream Chaser called for flying atop an Atlas V rocket. The manned SpaceX capsule would use the company's own Falcon 9 rocket. Cape Canaveral will be the sole launch site.

NASA paid each of these three major contenders hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years to spur development.

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin company in Washington state received NASA funding in the early rounds of competition, then said it would continue working on its own, unfunded by the government. The company had given sparse details about its progress and intent.

(TM and © Copyright 2014 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2014 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

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