Next month, NASA plans to reveal which of the four commercial crew astronauts will fly onboard Boeing or SpaceX's spacecraft to the International Space Station.
NASA and its commercial crew partners will announce Aug. 3 who will be on board either the SpaceX Crew Dragon launching on Falcon 9 or Boeing's Starliner CST-100 launching on the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.
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NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine will make the announcement at 11 a.m. at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Johnson Space Center Director Mark Geyer and Kennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana will join Bridenstine and representatives from Boeing and SpaceX to introduce the crews, according to the news release.
After the Space Shuttle Program ended, NASA selected commercial companies Boeing and SpaceX in 2014 to develop and launch new spacecraft to shuttle American astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
Both the Starliner and Crew Dragon are undergoing testing, with expected uncrewed test launches this fall. The extensive testing is all part of the certification process to launch NASA astronauts. Both spacecraft will launch from Cape Canaveral.
The Aug. 3. announcement will clarify who will fly on which spacecraft for the first human test flight and the first mission to the ISS.
It's been more than seven years since NASA sent its astronauts from U.S. soil. The space agency relies on the Russian space agency to deliver and bring home its astronauts from the ISS, and the contract with Roscosmos ends in 2019. If the commercial crew spacecraft aren't certified for human flight, NASA will need to renegotiate for seats on Russian vehicles or, for the first time in 16 years, a U.S. astronaut won't live on the orbiting laboratory. The contracting for those seats with Russia takes about three years, according to NASA officials.
NASA selected astronauts Robert Behnken, Eric Boe, Douglas Hurley and Sunita Williams in 2015 to work with Boeing or SpaceX and become the first commercial flight crew.
Beoing officials said earlier this week that former NASA astronaut Chris Ferguson will be the citizen test pilot on Starliner. Ferguson, who now works for Boeing, commanded the final July 2011 Space Shuttle Atlantis mission.
Ferguson told The Washington Post this week that he was the last astronaut to step off the shuttle.
"This is an exciting decision for our nation, our company and for Chris," a Boeing spokesperson said in a statement to News 6.
Ferguson will speak about his upcoming return to space at the event on Aug. 3, a Boeing spokesperson said.
Commercial crew astronauts began in April conducting fully suited exercises and simulations inside mock-ups of both SpaceX and Boeing spacecraft at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Depending on their spacecraft, the commercial crew astronauts will wear spacesuits designed by the corresponding company. Both companies reveled their suits last year.
The "Boeing blue" suit features mobility and Reebok boots. The whole suit weighs 20 pounds, half the weight of the current NASA spacesuit, according to Boeing officials.
Crew Dragon astronauts will wear sleek, mostly white spacesuits. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said it was "incredibly hard" to balance function and aesthetics for the hardware that will fulfill one of SpaceX's core obligations to NASA's commercial crew program.