Good news, everyone!This Thursday, NASA announced the first astronauts who will pilot its next generation of manned spacecraft, coming one step closer to ending a now four year period since the last American manned space launch of the Shuttle Atlantis on July 8, 2011.Robert Behnken, Eric Boe, Douglas Hurley, and Sunita Williams will advise on the final stages of development of the Boeing CST-100 and SpaceX Crew Dragon, two crew transport modules being simultaneously developed in concert with NASA to ferry American astronauts to and from the International Space Station.NASA will decide whether to proceed with either the CST-100 or the Dragon at a later date, and the four astronauts will also serve as the core group of test pilots on the first manned tests, scheduled to take place as early as 2017.The announcement comes less than two weeks after an explosion destroyed the SpaceX Falcon 9 booster moments after launch, and while it's still at least two years before manned testing, Behnken, Boe, Hurley and Williams will no doubt be approaching their work with urgency, as the Falcon 9 will be the initial booster rocket for the Crew Dragon.NASA has been trying to regain the capability to launch its own astronauts since the cancellation of the three decades old Space Shuttle program forced American astronauts to rely on Russian Soyuz rockets."Every dollar we invest in commercial crew is a dollar we invest in ourselves, rather than in the Russian economy," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden remarked. Now, with an initial crew announced, NASA has gotten a little closer to regaining the independence it desires to launch its own manned missions.