The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced Friday the names of the nine astronauts who will form the first two crews to travel to space from the United States in seven years , after the agency put an end to the launch of its ferries. .
In total, these nine astronauts will make up the test flight crews and the crews that will travel to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard the two commercial ships that the Boeing and SpaceX companies plan to send to the stratosphere along the next year .
"This is the thrill of the matter: for the first time, since 2011, we are about to send American astronauts on US rockets from US soil," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said during the presentation ceremony that took place at the Houston Space Center Johnson.
The first crew to be presented was Boeing's Starliner capsule, which will carry out a test flight scheduled for mid-2019 and will depart from the emblematic Cape Canaveral air base , powered by an Atlas V rocket from the United Launch Alliance .
This crew will be made up of three astronauts: Eric Boe , who was pilot of the shuttle Endeavor; Chris Ferguson , who participated in the last release, and debutante Nicole A. Mann .
After this first test flight, two pilots will travel in the Starliner to the ISS: Suni Williams , who since he was selected as an astronaut in 1998 has made seven space walks and spent more than 322 days in the stratosphere; and Josh Cassada , who still has no experience in space.
For its part, the Crew Dragon capsule SpaceX company, which will make a test trip on the back of a Falcon rocket launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, will have a crew of two people : Doug Hurley , who piloted both the Endevour like the ship Atlantis; and Bob Behnken , who has six spacewalks under his belt.
The two astronauts that the SpaceX company will later send to the ISS will be Mike Hopkins , with a 166-day experience in the space laboratory, and the debutant, Victor Glover , selected by NASA in 2013.
Despite its commercial nature, with these launches the United States returns to take center stage in the space race after seven years ago began to depend on the infrastructure of Russia to send astronauts into space, with the aim of reducing the cost of your missions.
" Only three countries in history have sent human beings into space : the United States, Russia and China," Kennedy Space Center director Bob Cabana proudly recalled today.