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Boeing Employees To Man CST-100 Crew Capsule
The BBC reports that Boeing has a source of human passengers to populate its manned crew transport vehicle, the CST-100: Boeing employees. The CST-100 is Boeing's bid to replace more expensive options, such as the recently retired space shuttle family, for delivering astronauts to space, including to the International Space Station. The lucky employees (interns?) won't have a chance to visit space until the experimental capsule first makes two unmanned trips, lifted by an Atlas V rocket. These first three trips are all slated for 2015.
Question, is the Atlas rocket man rated for space?
Not yet. But three of the four CommercialCrew contractors have chosen the Atlas. (The fourth, obviously, is SpaceX.)
Why are we developing new LEO rockets when we already have working ones, aside from payload capacity?
Independent experts in Utah have advised certain learned members of congress that no alternative is viable.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
We didn't forget it. We chose not to apply it, and go with solids instead. Then ATK, the manufacturer of the solids bought the senator in charge of NASA's budget to make sure that everything post-shuttle had solid rockets. Hence, the ARES fiasco, and why we haven't got a shuttle replacement.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
We're certainly buying the RD-180 engines from the Russians. I don't believe Pratt & Whitney is manufacturing them yet, though they have a license to do so.
Kerosene/RP-1 is much, much easier to handle, and in spite of the lower Isp, presents a more cost effective solution from a system perspective. Optimizing the engine to run on LH2 for maximum Isp imparts an enormous programmatic cost. Would have been more cost effective to use the lower Isp engine. That's a program management failure, because a collection of point-optimized elements rarely results in an optimal system solution.