Live coverage: Atlas 5 countdown and launch journal

NASA’s last space shuttle commander — former U.S. Navy fighter pilot Chris Ferguson — will fly Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner crew capsule on its first piloted test mission to the International Space Station next year.

NASA cited the complexity of Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser space plane and an uncertainty of when the proposed crew transport craft would be ready to fly astronauts to the International Space Station as the primary reasons the agency picked Boeing and SpaceX for lucrative contracts to develop commercial space taxis.

The OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample retrieval mission atop an Atlas 5 rocket lifts off from launch complex 41, as seen by our camera at the NASA Kennedy Space Center press site.