Five companies will get $50 million in federal stimulus-package funding to begin technology work that could support NASA’s shift to commercial space transportation under the Obama Administration’s new space policy.

Blue Origin, Boeing, Paragon Space Development corp., Sierra Nevada Corp. and United Launch Alliance will roll out their plans for NASA’s long-awaited Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program at a Washington press conference with Administrator Charles Bolden on Tuesday morning.

The funds will be used to develop “crew concepts, technology demonstrations and investigations for future commercial support of human spaceflight,” Bolden said in unveiling the Obama space plan Monday.

That work could include human-rating existing launch vehicles, such as the Atlas V, Delta IV and SpaceX Falcon 9, and using some of the $6 billion more the U.S. space agency hopes to spend on commercial space transportation over the next five years to develop a common spacecraft that would replace the Orion crew exploration vehicle.

In his Fiscal 2011 budget request, Obama cancelled Orion and the rest of the Bush-era Constellation Program vehicles intended to take humans back to the Moon and on to Mars and other destinations, opting for an open-ended development program to advance exploration technologies instead of using heritage technology to build spacecraft.

“The fact we poured $9 billion into an unexecutable program really isn’t an excuse to pour another $50 billion and still not have an executable program,” said Jim Kohlenberger, chief of staff at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, referring to sunk funds in the Constellation effort.

Closeout of those contracts will cost another $2.5 billion, according to the budget, provided Congress can be persuaded to go along with the plan. Opposition to the change in direction from senators with constituent interests in Constellation came quickly on Monday.

“The President’s proposed NASA budget begins the death march for the future of U.S. human space flight,” said Republican Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, site of the Marshall Space Flight Center that is developing the Ares family of launch vehicles for Constellation.

“If the commercial boys don’t’ work, then we are stuck for upwards of a decade relying on the Russians, and that’s not a good position to be in,” said Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who said he is trying to “ameliorate” the loss of 7,000 jobs at Kennedy Space Center when the space shuttle is retired after five more flights.

Nelson, who is chairman of the Senate panel that authorizes NASA spending, conceded it would be “very difficult” to find the votes to continue the Constellation program in the face of opposition from President Barack Obama. But he noted that Congress gets the final word on federal spending, and called for a “joint decision” on future space policy.

Norman Augustine, the former Lockheed Martin CEO who headed the outside panel that reviewed NASA’s human spaceflight plans for the White House, found that the Obama budget “does appear to respond to the primary concerns highlighted in our committee’s report,” according to a statement posted on the OSTP website.

“While many of us who believe strongly in human spaceflight might have hoped that still further funding would have been possible, this is obviously a demanding period from a budgetary standpoint,” Augustine stated. “Importantly, the President’s proposed program seems to match means to ends, and should therefore be executable.”