Nasa on April 18 awarded a combined $269 million to four companies designing spacecraft capable of ferrying passengers to and from low Earth orbit on a commercial basis, but snubbed industry proposals to develop rockets that could launch the capsules. A follow-on to last year's Com-mercial Crew Development (CCDev) awards, which doled out $50 million in NASA Space Act Agreements to seed technology development in support of commercial crew transportation, NASA's second round of CCDev awards is supposed to accelerate work on elements of those systems.
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