NASA to name astronauts for SpaceX and Boeing missions: live video

NASA
astronaut Sunita “Suni” Williams tests mock-ups of SpaceX’s Crew
Dragon spaceship and spacesuit.

SpaceX

• SpaceX and Boeing built new spaceships for
  NASA to fly its astronauts into orbit.
• NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, as
  it’s called, will soon launch launch one uncrewed and two
  crewed test flights of each new spacecraft.
• On Friday, NASA plans to announce the eight astronauts
  who will fly either SpaceX’s Crew Dragon or Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner ships for
  the first time.
• NASA TV is broadcasting video of the announcement live
  from Texas.

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NASA is about to name the first
astronauts ever to fly commercial spaceships.

On Friday, the space agency plans to announce crews for the first
flights of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner.
NASA will broadcast video of the announcement, and you can watch
live starting around 11 a.m. EDT via the embed at the end of this
post.

The announcement is a big deal because the last American
crew-carrying spacecraft — NASA’s fleet of four space shuttle
orbiters — retired in July 2011. Since then, NASA has been forced
to rely solely on Russia’s
increasingly expensive Soyuz spaceships to get to the

International Space Station (ISS), in which the US government
has invested about $100 billion.

SpaceX and Boeing’s new spacecraft are shaping up to be two
solutions to that problem. They’re both the result of NASA’s
Commercial Crew Program: a nearly 10-year-long, $8-billion effort
to maintain access to orbit for US astronauts.

However, both companies still have to prove that their vehicles
can fly to the ISS and return safely to Earth.

To certify that the Crew Dragon and CST-100 Starliner are ready
to become NASA’s new go-to space taxis, SpaceX and Boeing are
each planning three test missions. Flights without any people are
expected before the end of 2018, followed by two crewed missions
sometime in 2019. (The first test flights were originally slated
to launch in 2017, but the program didn’t meet that deadline.)

An
illustration of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft (left) and
Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft (right).
NASA/Kennedy Space Center (via Flickr); Boeing; Shayanne
Gal/Business Insider

Four of the eight astronauts will almost certainly be Bob
Behnken, Eric Boe, Doug Hurley, and
Sunita “Suni” Williams. Sometimes called the “Commercial Crew
Cadre,” those astronauts are seasoned veterans who’ve worked
closely with Boeing and SpaceX on their new spacecraft and
systems over the past three years.

The other four astronauts that NASA has selected, however, aren’t
yet publicly known. (However, Boeing also plans to launch a third
person on its first crewed mission: Chris Ferguson, a company
employee and retired NASA astronaut, according
to the Washington Post.)

NASA plans to announce its final decision on the crews — two
astronauts for each of the four crewed test flights — on Friday
morning.

You can watch NASA’s Commercial Crew Program mission selection
event live via NASA TV, which is streaming video from Johnson
Space Center in Texas.

Around 11 a.m. EDT on Friday, August 3, return to this page and
click the player below.

If the feed doesn’t load for any reason, you can also try to
watch via YouTube, Ustream, or the space agency’s NASA TV website.