Robert Behnken, Sunita Williams, Eric Boe and Douglas Hurley will train to fly to space on commercial crew vehicles, NASA said.
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Bolden highlights how SpaceX and Boeing are helping NASA focus on other areas. He also was selected as an astronaut in 2000, and spent more than 28 days in space, flying as the pilot of STS-127 in July 2009 and STS-135 in July 2011, the last flight of the Space Shuttle Program.
According to the Washington Post, Sunita Williams, Robert Behnken, Eric Boe and Douglas Hurley are a group of military veterans, pilots and now are now experienced NASA astronauts.
Boe was apart of STS-126 and STS-133. They have a combined total of more than 400 days in space, thanks largely to Williams’ two station stints, and more than 85 hours of spacewalking time.
“These distinguished, veteran astronauts are blazing a new trail, a trail that will one day land them in the history books and Americans on the surface of Mars”, said NASA administrator Charles Bolden, who announced the formation of the Launch America team.
It expects to cut on average about $18 million per person when it starts buying rides from SpaceX and Boeing, but overall crew transportation costs will increase because NASA intends to add a seventh astronaut to the current six-member station crew.
July has always been a big month for America’s space agency.
“These four astronauts are being identified for the initial crew test flights”. Since September 2014, Hurley has been appointed the assistant director for the commercial crew program under the Flight Operations Directorate (FOD) at Johnson Space Center.
“Had we received everything [President Obama] asked for, we’d be preparing to send these astronauts to space on commercial carriers as soon as this year”, Bolden said. Getting astronauts to the ISS via US based launches is one small step that will eventually lead to deep space missions.
NASA said the four were chosen for their spaceflight experience.
Plus, NASA will save almost $20 million per seat with an American-owned spacecraft.
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The US has had to use Russian facilities and Soyuz craft to ferry crew to the worldwide Space Station ever since the space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011.
