Big news at NASA: The agency has chosen Boeing and SpaceX to carry astronauts to the International Space Station. So reports my colleague Chris Davenport. This keeps competition in the commercial crew program. Its also a major achievement for Elon Musk and the several thousand employees of SpaceX who have turned a start-up company into a major player in the space industry. Some lawmakers wanted NASA to go with a single company and Old Space stalwart Boeing was always a front-runner but the career folks at NASA who made this decision have opted for two providers, which gives them some flexibility if one of the companies has a major problem.

For several years now, NASA has had only one option for sending Americans into space the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. The Russians charge about $71 million per seat, and NASA has in a single year sent more than $400 million to Russia for these taxi rides. If the schedule doesnt slip, and Boeing and SpaceX are successful, NASA should see its astronauts launched on U.S. soil with American rockets circa 2017/2018.

The end result of this contract will be a single mission for each company to demonstrate the capability of delivering astronauts to the ISS. An operational contract will be awarded down the road after that capability has been shown.

We dont know yet how the money will be divided between the two companies, but Im told one company will get more money than the other. Its important to note that Boeing charges more than SpaceX. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Boeing will get the bulk of the money, but that may simply reflect Boeings pricing. If so, it would be wrong to suggest that Boeing somehow won the competition.

Official announcement will be at 4 p.m. We await word from the companies involved.

Left out in the cold, apparently, is Sierra Nevada Corp., which had developed a winged space plane that looked like a miniature space shuttle. Sierra Nevada had some troubles with its Dream Chaser vehicle (it did a face-plant, sort of, during a test flight a while back), and NASA may have felt that Boeing and SpaceX would be ready to go sooner and time is money, given what were paying the Russians.If the early reports hold up, and its Boeing and SpaceX, that means NASA has decided to go all-capsule foregoing the winged orbiter model which could be useful for certain kinds of missions and cargo returns to Earth.

Theres another development, first reported by the Journal, that weve now confirmed via an official with knowledge of the situation: Blue Origin, the company founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos (whofounded Amazon.com andowns The Washington Post), will provide rocket engines to the Atlas 5 rocket owned by United Launch Alliance, the Boeing-Lockheed partnership that has a virtual monopoly on national security launches.

This is probably the biggest surprise of the day. Blue Origin has never launched anything into orbit, and has kept a low profile for years now. Space blogger Jeff Foust has reported that Bezos has sunk half a billion dollars in Blue Origin. This deal is a blockbuster partnership between Old Space and New Space and may force us to retire that dichotomy. [More here at Spacenews.com.]

The Atlas 5 currently uses an RD-180 Russian-made engine. With U.S.-Russia relations at a low point, Russian officials have made noises about cutting off the supply of such engines.SpaceX, which is in a protracted battle with ULA to gain access to the national security launch market, has pointed out that Boeings crew capsule is launched on an Atlas 5 rocket. So it appears that Boeing and ULA see Blue Origin as the solution to an embarrassing problem. If Blue Origins engine can replace the RD-180 on the Atlas 5, that may have made Boeings bid more attractive to NASA.

No comment yet from Blue Origin, which is famously tight-lipped about its plans.

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Achenbach: Taxi to orbit: NASA goes with Old Space and New Space (with a cameo by Jeff Bezos)