Nasa picks astronaut crew ship designs

The US space agency Nasa has picked the companies it hopes can take the country's astronauts back into space.

It is giving around $6.2bn (£3.8bn) to the Boeing and SpaceX firms, to help them finish creating new crew capsules.

President Obama asked Nasa to look for new ways to get its astronauts to and from space in 2010 and a number of big businesses put forward their ideas.

The space agency used to use space shuttles which were a bit like planes.

They would blast off attached to a rocket, and glide back down to Earth to land, but they stopped using the shuttles in 2011.

Since then the US has had to use Russian rockets to reach orbit.