NASA Names Its Astronauts For the First Dragon and CST-100 Flights

schwit1 writes with news that NASA has named the four government astronauts that will fly on the first manned demo flights to ISS of SpaceX's Dragon and Boeing's CST-100. From Florida Today's report: Bob Behnken, Eric Boe, Doug Hurley and Sunita Williams are veteran test pilots who have flown on the shuttle and the International Space Station. NASA said the four astronauts will train with both companies and have not yet been assigned to flights. Two-person crews will fly the first test flights by each capsule, after they have completed an orbital test flight without people on board. Company proposals anticipate an all-NASA crew flying SpaceX's Dragon test flight, with Boeing's CST-100 carrying a split NASA-Boeing crew. Boeing has not yet identified its astronaut.

Comments

Very cool! Wish the best of luck!

[Anonymous Coward]

For those that think they are funny, this is not an unmanned effort or just a piece of software, but rather actual human beings that go at great risk to help advance and potentially even allow for the continuation of our civilization. A bit more respect and appreciation is in order here.

Re:great timing

[bledri]

they have not yet found all the reasons for the exploding rocket disaster and already announce that they will put humans in there soon. wow.

Wow indeed. But only in regard to your lack of understanding of how things get done in the real world. The first human launch on an F9 is over two years from now. That is plenty of time to identify and fix the problem, or if they can't (a ridiculously unlikely outcome) then they can make a new plan.

Or should we have shutdown all civil air travel until MH370 is found and the root cause analysis is complete?

P.S. In case you are unaware, there are two commercial crew providers. Only one of them use the F9. That's by design. It's called redundancy.

Re:great timing

[bledri]

That wasn't very nice of you to say. You're also [stupidly] assuming that 1) Survival instinct is trumped by rationality 2) The astronauts have complete faith in SpaceX's ability to correctly identify and solve the problem that didn't show up on their boards at all There is no reason why these people can't be of two minds about this topic.

There're astronauts. They choose to do this for a career. They spent their entire educations and careers focussed on getting into space. They are all test pilots and all of them flew missions on the Space Shuttle after NASA lost two of them and choose to compete for flying on commercial crew. NASA, the NTSB, and the FAA have to approve every item that SpaceX removes from the fault tree analysis. They aren't just trusting SpaceX.

Yes, they have a survival instinct, and yes they constantly override it with rationality. And the reward they get is to work on the ISS and orbit the Earth.