NASA’s new commercial crew astronauts: Each wants to fly 1st

Apart from Ms. Williams, Robert Behnken, Douglas Hurley and Eric Boe have been chosen and will be trained for the spaceflights that are commercial.

After the receiving of pictures from our neighboring planet Mars, it has been officially announced that four astronauts have been drafted to dwell Mars on the first commercial crew vehicle. The team said that as of now they haven’t come up with a more media-savvy name for them.

Bennken, a crew pilot, commented that the incident didn’t gave them hesitation for the developing of commercial crew missions. The crews will be launching the test flights in Boeing’s CST-100 and SpaceX’s Dragon space vehicles. Both Boe and Behnken piloted two space shuttle missions, including the final one, STS-135, in July 2011.

He’s now the Assistant Director of New Programs, for the Flight Crew Operations Directorate (FCOD) at Johnson Space Center.

In contrast to the two Air Force flyboys, Douglas Hurley is a former marine and naval test pilot who was the first jarhead to fly the F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet.

The Boeing and SpaceX taxi flights will enable NASA to increase the space station’s current crew of six to seven, allowing more science research to be conducted onboard the microgravity laboratory. Williams, a Navy captain, was in space missions between 2006-2007 and 2012.

The Space Shuttle had retired in 2011 and since then NASA was totally dependent on the Russian Soyuz rocket for transportation of NASA’s astronauts to the ISS.

The four astronauts will on capsules built by SpaceX and Boeing.

“Congratulations to Bob, Doug, Eric and Suni on being the first group of astronauts selected for flight training as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program”, Gwynne Shotwell, president and COO of SpaceX, said in the release. A decorated Navy veteran, Capt. Williams has accumulated 322 days in space, holds the record spacewalk time for a female astronaut at 50 hours and 40 minutes and ranks sixth in all-time space endurance.

Boe has spent a similar amount of time in space on two shuttle missions, as did Hurley.

NASA also said that the four were chosen for their spaceflight experience.

The four selected astronauts will now cooperate and work closely with SpaceX and Boeing in order to develop the commercial spacecrafts. It also frees NASA from having to deal with an increasingly fractious Putin regime. “It now costs $76 million per astronaut to fly on a Russian spacecraft”.

SpaceX and Orbital ATK are part of NASA’s plan to use private contractors to carry cargo and astronauts to low-earth orbit while it focuses on longer distant space exploration, including eventually taking humans to Mars. She told the university’s Florida Tech Today magazine in an earlier interview that the extended studies program was an ideal fit.