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."

Comments

What about SpaceX?

[kindups]

I don't think this is the first commerical spacecraft. SpaceX has been working on their Dragon capsule along with the lift vehicles.

If by "show off" you mean "a couple of paintings"

[jfengel]

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.

Re:The Big B finally weighs in.

[camperdave]

SpaceX is months away from test flights of the Dragon capsule. It'll be years before Boeing is anywhere near ready to launch. Besides, SpaceX already has a contract to run crew and cargo up to the ISS.