NASA orders first commercial crew flight from Boeing

U.S. space agency NASA said Wednesday it has ordered the first-ever commercial crew flight to the International Space Station from the Boeing Company as part of an ongoing effort to restore America's human spaceflight capabilities by 2017.

Another company, SpaceX, is expected to receive its first order later this year, NASA said, adding that it will decide at a later time about which company will be the first to fly.

Boeing and SpaceX were selected in September 2014 to build the United States' commercial passenger spacecraft, the Crew Space Transportation (CST)-100 and Dragon, respectively. The vehicles' first flights were currently planned for 2017.

NASA explained in a statement that flight orders are made two to three years prior to the missions "to provide time for each company to manufacture and assemble the launch vehicle and spacecraft."

According to the space agency, Boeing has successfully demonstrated that its commercial crew transportation system, including the CST-100 spacecraft, has reached design maturity appropriate to proceed to assembly, integration and test activities.

Separately, SpaceX successfully performed a pad abort test of its flight vehicle earlier this month.

Under NASA's contracts, both companies will respectively fly a minimum of two and a maximum potential of six missions.

NASA has had to rely on Russian spacecraft to transport its astronauts to the space station and back since the space shuttle program retired in 2011. Endite