Nasa has appointed Boeing and SpaceX to ferry its astronauts to the International Space Station, in a giant step toward returning human spaceflight to US soil.
Since retiring its fleet of shuttles three years ago, the space agency's crew have been hitching rides on Russian transport - at a cost of $70m per seat - to reach the habitable satellite.
Nasa officials made the announcement at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, where the launches should lift off by 2017.
The agency will pay the companies $6.8bn (£4.2bn) - $4.2bn to Boeing and $2.6bn to SpaceX.
Nasa Administrator Charles Bolden said: "Today we are one step closer to launching our astronauts from US soil on American spacecraft."
He said the deal would allow the space agency "to focus on an even more ambitious mission, that of sending humans to Mars".
Aerospace veteran Boeing has a history with the US space programme going back half a century.
SpaceX is already delivering cargo to the space station. It is backed by Tesla owner Elon Musk, who dreams of colonising Mars.
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