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Boeing Shows Off First Commercial Spacecraft
coondoggie writes "Boeing today released the first public glimpse of the commercial spacecraft it is working on under an $18 million contract with NASA. Boeing's Crew Space Transportation (CST)-100 can hold seven crew and will be bigger than Apollo but smaller than NASA's Orion, and be able to launch on a variety of different rockets, including Atlas, Delta and Falcon.The company envisions the spacecraft supporting the International Space Station and future Bigelow Aerospace Orbital Space Complex systems. Bigelow is building what it calls 'expandable habitats,' that which are inflatable spacecraft would act as large, less costly space stations."
Interesting that Boeing has finally weighed in with something new for human space transport and that their offering looks very much like a commodity product. Somewhat surprising for such a larger organization that is used to fat government contracts with no competition past the initial bidding. That the capsule will be able to launch on a variety of rockets will hopefully be a boon to the budding commercial space industry. My only fear is that this is a Microsoft-type extend and embrace move to smother the pesky upstarts in the field (e.g. SpaceX, Armadillo, etc.).
Regardless, it is nice to see that the government and private sectors will soon have an ability to choose, it sure beats the old system.
"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." - Carl Sagan
I don't think this is the first commerical spacecraft. SpaceX has been working on their Dragon capsule along with the lift vehicles.
Here's an article about it that sucks slightly less, with more and bigger paintings:
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1007/21boeing/
It's still a stretch to call it "showing off" when you haven't even got a mock up.
I think the bad summary is supposed to mean Boeing's first. It was worth saving the 3 extra letters, though!
... And I was under the impression Boeing wouldn't even get out of bed for that much, you know?
On the subject of money... There are people who are billionaires to the point where they could easily drop 5, 10 billion bucks on space - why hasn't anyone REALLY wealthy done that?
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Just looking at it . . . wow, inspirational! Like a soaring eagle caught in a trash can, or a supersonic fighter melted down and used to cast an extrusion mold for dog treats.
This was posted about a month ago: http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/09/26/153251/SpaceX-Announces-Dragon-As-First-Falcon-9-Payload. Not the exact same article, but I recognized the quote.
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Not only that - "spacecraft" is a rather...general term, encompassing also unmanned ones. Some among those can be easily considered commercial, and for some time.
Plus - SpaceShipOne is one, if only suborbital. Apart from SpaceX, those guys also have something (even if its heritage is not "pure"...but what is?)
One that hath name thou can not otter
That second article has a cutaway view of what it would look like inside w/astronauts in it, to give you a sense of scale. Jesus, they're sure crammed in there, aren't they? What would the point of putting in so many people that they could barely move be? I suppose this thing isn't really for Shuttle-style science, just getting people to and from space stations, so they'd only have to be packed in like that for a day or two at a time...
Since it's even in some collabaration with Bigelow - yeah, mostly just a ferry to some quite spacious station.
Besides, people voluntarily pack themselves into comparably small spaces anyway; usually even with worse view or less awesome destination.
One that hath name thou can not otter
It's a taxi, pure and simple. up to 7 people crammed in. Battery power, air, food and water for 24-48 hours. Not many options: Launch. Reach orbit and dock with station; OR, abort and return to ground.
I don't think it even qualifies as commercial. The customer is NASA (gov't).
Have gnu, will travel.
The days of mockups are over. Who needs to build something to see how it all fits together when it can be done on computer? Development time goes down, costs go down, etc. That's not to say that they're never needed, but building a mockup to prove a concept is just so outmoded.
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I guess we define "shows off" differently where I come from.
I guess I'm old fashioned, but I don't recall ever seeing someone "show off" by showing poor quality mockups of something they never actually intend to make.
Inflatable Spacecraft? If we cant take knives on a plane...just imagine what we cant take on those craft
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Well, they're kind of crammed on the Dragon, too.
I'd much rather see an HL-42 styled craft. Give me a horizontal landing, on an actual runway. None of this splashing down in the ocean and waiting for the flippin' navy to rescue you.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Or does this make Soyuz look state-of-the-art?
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"This kind of crap we can do (or, ehm, draw) with 18 mil..."
Now fork over 18 bil. and we'll see what we can do!
This is Boeing after all!
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... about going into space. It seems like a colossal waste of money to go somewhere, frankly, not all that interesting. With terrestrial destinations, there are sights, sounds, tastes, etc. In space, there's one single sight, and maybe some bragging rights, but that's about it.
You could look at this as troll, or as an excuse for lively discussion. ;-)
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
A boating analogy is probably appropriate here: Unless you have a rich benefactor who will pay for the design and development of a large luxury yacht, you have to develop your market first and start with something cheap and easy to build, like a canoe. Right now the government is not willing to play the role of the rich uncle. They want to buy canoes, simple flat bottom boats, and rafts that are adequate for a minor river crossing in good weather.
OK, so the analogy fails. Boeing could be it's own rich benefactor.... They're still a business. a business that is watching other small upstart rivals (SpaceX and Orbital) develop the market with some success. This is on top of an existing successful rival in the Russian Soyuz. Boeing has to respond to that.
So it seems Boeing want in on space tourism? Great, now all i need is tens of millions of dollars and maybe i can get a seat! Guess i'l have to settle for some nasa canvas art instead! :-P
If that many people can be crammed into this capsule then I think some design "compromises" had to be made in order to save space.
One example that comes to mind is the space toilet -- it would really suck if you had to shit or urinate in your space suit on the way to the/a station.
Personally, I'm hoping something like the Kliper design takes off. Horizontal lifting body designs lend themselves to more space plus the added advantage of not having to take as many Gs on atmospheric re-entry.
Anyway, here's a somewhat tacky video detailing a hypothetical (CST)-100 mission.
jdb2
for a horizontal landing on a runway, you need wings, heatshields for those wings, landing gear, control surfaces, and servos for them. it adds up to a lot of weight to haul up and down to and from orbit every time, just so you can play pilot. the space shuttle orbiter is 68 freakin tonnes empty, and 78 tonnes with the engines installed, and a extra 24 tonnes for actual payload. compared to what gets into orbit, thats a pretty pathetic fraction thats payload.
they're sure crammed in there, aren't they? What would the point of putting in so many people that they could barely move be? I suppose this thing isn't really for Shuttle-style science, just getting people to and from space stations, so they'd only have to be packed in like that for a day or two at a time...
Welcome to the world of Boeing commercial vehicles.
So it's made out of a special carbon fiber called Papier-mâché.
When /. first started, this article would have had 100-300 responses. The same is true of any OS type article. Yet, now it is non-intellectual articles such as facebook, pot, and job's statements, that garner the big discussions. It looks like the techs have left the building.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I want one of the top seats.
I used to have a friend who worked at NASA. He used to joke that the agency was the world's most expensive animation studio, since that's all they really ever produced.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
for a horizontal landing on a runway, you need wings
True, but there's no reason they can't be packed away until needed.
the space shuttle orbiter is 68 freakin tonnes empty, and 78 tonnes with the engines installed, and a extra 24 tonnes for actual payload
All of which means diddly-squat. The space shuttle is not a crew capsule that sits atop a launch vehicle. The space shuttle *IS* the launch vehicle. As such, it is a completely different beast. Apart from the one characteristic of landing on a runway, it has almost nothing in common with an HL-42/X-38 style vehicle.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
What you're looking for is the Dreamchaser, which also got money from NASA under the recent CCDev awards. The point here is that we should end up with options, though I can't imagine more than 2 would be viable (maybe 3 if some are also used for cargo).
We're trying to make space flight more economical.
A bigger capsule would be heavier. Economical and heavy are opposites in space flight.
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It's still a stretch to call it "showing off" when you haven't even got a mock up.
A mock-up of an earlier version with model crew inside was shown off last year, back before Bigelow had announced Boeing as its partner (I believe they actually were partnered back then, just hadn't officially announced):
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/090814-orion-lite.html
Those horizontal and vertical control surfaces are going to make some hellish oscillations upon reentry and even during simple orbital maneuvers. To damp those responses, you are going to need very expensive materials and very complex control systems. It's not an unsolvable problem, but it is an expensive one to solve. The nice thing about capsule style landers is that the simple structural framework they are built around negates these problems without more machinery and exotic materials. That's probably one of the design drivers when drafting plans for a quick turn around, reusable space transportation system. Less complexity also means less maintenance costs.
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The picture at your HL42 site looks kind of like the thing that Major Steve Austin crashed back in the 1970's. We still can't build his prosthetics even at our current best, and I'll bet the best we could do today would cost a heck of a lot more than $6e6.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I'd have settled for a digital rendering from plans. This isn't even that. These are paintings, containing no more engineering than you'd see on the cover of a sci-fi pulp novel.
Why would you want something like this x38? It seems to me that what you want in a space taxi is internal volume and safety. I would think a simpler shape for you heat shield would be more reliable, and cheaper, than an complex lifting body plane shape.
If you're just going to put a parafoil on it anyway, you might as well do the same for a capsule design.
Giant aerospace company designs hardware for NASA - how is this news? How is this suddenly "commercial"?
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Having enough control to perform a landing on the tarmac somewhere is the important detail. Having to have an aircraft carrier group stationed in the Atlantic to rescue the astronauts and salvage the capsule, then having to wash it down, dry it out, and refurbish it has got to be a lot more expensive than having the capsule gently touch down on the runway beside the Vehicle Assembly Building.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The picture at your HL42 site looks kind of like the thing that Major Steve Austin crashed back in the 1970's.
There's a very good reason for that. The HL42 is based on the the HL-10, which was, in turn, based on the Northrop M2-F2. Footage from tests of both the Northrop M2-F2 and the HL-10 were used to create the opening credits of "The Six Million Dollar Man".
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The reason for an entire carrier task force to be assigned for the recovery of astronauts was both for American prestige (to treat the astronauts as heroes hence giving the U.S. Navy an excellent public relations opportunity) and because of the incredibly lousy guidance computers involved in those flights.
Keep in mind that the CPU power of the Apollo Guidance Computer found inside of the Apollo Command Module was roughly the same processing power and nearly the same number of transistors as it typically found in a modern hotel card-key entry system on an ordinary hotel room door. Saying it is comparable to a modern cellphone doesn't do the cell phone justice. A cell phone has the CPU power of almost all of NASA in the mid-1960's including the equipment at Mission Control in Houston. This includes multi-tasking capabilities too.
Basically, back during the Apollo days, NASA was luck to hit a target about the size of the Pacific Ocean, and the astronauts even trained for the potential to be landing in even more exotic and remote locations in case they missed that ocean completely. With modern guidance systems, GPS navigation, and other factors included it is no longer necessary to have a full carrier group for the recovery of a ballistic capsule, if it was really even necessary earlier. Perhaps a ship to perform the recovery, such as the two ships NASA currently has to recover the SRBs after each Shuttle launch.
Are you sure they're paintings? I was going to respond in a similar vein to the previous poster about mock-ups being a bit old school. However, as to them being paintings, the craft renderings look like they came out of CATIA or similar.
Looks like they just dusted-off one of the old ACRV (Assured Crew Return Vehicle) designs for ISS from the 1990s. IIRC, Boeing proposed a slightly larger Apollo capsule (they got the Apollo IP from their acquisition of North American) with new docking port and mini service module as an ISS lifeboat. What's cheaper than a little napkin engineering followed by some drawings and a powerpoint? why, re-using some napkin engineering, updating a powerpoint and doing a new CG version of a drawing, of course!
move along
nothing new to see here
The SNC Dream Chaser is further along than both.
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Its 2010 and Nasa still utilizes technology which is basicly advanced WW2 technology. All still derived, and in a lot of cases badly derived from Wernher van Brauns efforts to bring man into space. Actually van Brauns concepts had been bold in comparison to what NASA did put up afther they exiled van Braun from working in the US space programm. Competing concepts, like "SpaceShipOne" from Scaled Composites, and NASA`s space Shuttle, have their root in technology at least 50 years old! Whereas NASA's Space-Shuttle is a lame excuese for "Dr Eugen Saenger" System http://www.phoxim.de/alexander_tomas_saenger/alexander_tomas_saenger.html (Sorry german only) Scaled Composites is doing well. Concerning the US Government putting money into NASA and outdated technology: You bet that everys governments nightmare is private corps beeing able to go to space. The DONT WANT US THERE. THEY want to control who is able to reach orbit and beyond.