NASA Hires Lockheed, Northrop, Boeing

Lockheed Martin Corp. and a team from Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp. each won a contract valued at about $28 million to design a manned spacecraft to replace NASA’s aging space shuttle fleet. The companies will spend eight months developing designs for the vehicles and related programs, NASA said.

NASA plans to pick a winning design and give a single contractor the task of building the six-astronaut spacecraft early next year.

The spacecraft is expected to carry astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit after the space shuttle is retired in 2010, and then to the moon as early as 2015.