Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
If I were SpaceX founder Elon Musk, I'd be hopping mad right now. After developing Falcon9 and Dragon on the basis of a truly competitive commercial space program, the porkbarrel senators for aerospace/defense contractor states wrote a new NASA budget to basically hand money over to Boeing and the rest of the usual cast of trough-feeders to continue but with changes and more delays the Ares/Orion program. This craft will see about as much reality as the Orion did before Boeing is behind schedule and over budget and requests yet more money.
The whole goal is to crowd out the smaller guys while maintaining the jobs programs in states like Washington, Utah, and Florida.
Did anyone notice that they don't say where they are going in this capsule? Where are the senators who called Obama's proposed budget a mission to nowhere? This new NASA program doesn't have a destination, either, but at least the dollars keep flowing to the same interests.
Relax a bit. Bigelow is involved with thise Boeing capsule; seems they want a competition in servicing their stations.
One that hath name thou can not otter
In other words, Boeing is a lot more savvy to how the aerospace market actually works, as opposed to how we would like it to work.