On a cloudless morning, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden stood at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. where the U.S. dominated human spaceflight for half a century and revealed plans for the space agency's next chapter.

On Friday, NASA handed out $1.1 billion in contracts to three companies to privately develop a new generation of spacecraft that could one day ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

Now that the space shuttle fleet has been retired, NASA has no way to travel to the space station other than shelling out $63 million each time one of its astronauts rides on a Russian Soyuz rocket.

"By investing in American companies and American ingenuity, we're spurring free-market competition to give taxpayers more bang for the buck," Bolden said during the news conference. "We're also making important progress toward ending the outsourcing of American aerospace jobs and bringing them right back to Florida and other states all across this country."

Southern California's aerospace industry was a major beneficiary of the announcement. Hawthorne-based rocket maker Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, won $440 million from NASA to develop its hardware. And Boeing Co., which develops spacecraft in Huntington Beach and uses rocket engines made by Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne in Canoga Park, won $460 million.

And $212.5 million went to Sierra Nevada Corp. of Sparks, Nev., which is building a space plane that resembles a miniature space shuttle.

The awards are part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, which lays the groundwork for a new reliance on private companies to transport astronauts.

NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, who was visiting Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Caada Flintridge in anticipation of Sunday's Mars rover landing, said the companies have plenty of work ahead.

"We anticipate a lot of exciting things from these companies over the next 21 months," she said. "NASA is ready to loosen its grip and let these companies take over."

The overall design of NASA's previous space-going vehicles and their missions were tightly controlled by the government and contracted to aerospace giants.

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NASA taps Boeing, SpaceX, Sierra Nevada to develop new spacecraft