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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.
I've seen rather intensive internships in my days, but never anything quite that demanding. Working interns for 18+ hours a day is one thing, but locking them into work for a week or more is quite a bit different. Does Boeing pay their interns (although in this case life insurance might be the more important bit)?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
SpaceX, Dragon, Elon Musk. Nuff said.
...if we got back into space one way or the other. I don't care if the people going up are "officially managed" NASA astronauts or not.
Question, is the Atlas rocket man rated for space? Why are we developing new LEO rockets when we already have working ones, aside from payload capacity? Just asking...
The Atlas V uses Kerosene / LOX for it's 1st stage instead of Liquid Hydrogen. Something we learned in the 60's then forgot with the shuttle. Of course we have to buy them from the Russians.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
If we ever get space hotels, I guess I can just go there with my flying car instead.
Seriously, why does every space story need to involve a reference to space hotels ?
I'm sure Boeing, or anyone, could find plenty of volunteers willing to get launched into space... even more so if there's a good chance of making it back alive. A lot of people would (and sometimes do) pay millions for the privilege.
Saturday morning breakfast cereal, for a change.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Does Boeing pay their interns (although in this case life insurance might be the more important bit)?
Since the market price for the trip is $20~35 million they are paid much better than the Boeing CEO. They are getting in one week the value of what's paid to the CEO in a year
I think you're on to something here!
Let's send the Boeing CEO in to space, and let him pay back the company the cost of the trip out of his own paycheck! And while we're at it, if we can send one CEO to space, let's send all our CEOs into space!
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I found the new crew uniform!
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Yep and it is exactly the direction that should be taken. I know if it was my ass on the line I would take a capsule over a over engineered shuttle any day.
The shuttle was a incredible show of stupidity. Why hoist all of the control surfaces, landing gear, associated control equipment into space just so it can land on a runway.
Got Code?
Some pretty smart people designed well-optimised capsule shapes in the 60's. Physics hasn't changed in the half-century since then.
you will have to pay the costs and maybe your own insurance here is forum to add it to your student loans.
any ways I have seen places wanting up to 6 month internship full time no pay + maybe have to pay some of your own costs to do the job.
The shuttle was a incredible show of stupidity. Why hoist all of the control surfaces, landing gear, associated control equipment into space just so it can land on a runway.
That's like asking why you put all the control surfaces and landing gear on an airliner just so it can land on a runway rather than have the passengers parachute out at the end of the flight and crash it into the ground? The shuttle made sense so long as it could fly every couple of weeks as NASA originally claimed; it made no sense when it only few once a year... the fixed costs killed it, not the cost of a single flight.
On an airliner, don't you need the control surfaces to fly, and the landing gear to take off ?
I'm sure professional astronauts don't mind a parachute landing.
so give a Interns tax hell for the rest of there lives as that $20M+ can be seen as income.
On an airliner, don't you need the control surfaces to fly, and the landing gear to take off ?
You could just stick it on a rocket booster and launch it on a ballistic trajectory to where you're going. Heck, that way you could remove the wings too.
The point is that if you really want to get the costs down, you need to fly a lot; and the best way to fly a lot is to build something you just refuel and fly again with minimal maintenance. The shuttle tried to take a big step toward that goal, but it was a dismal failure.
Teacher: "And what do YOU want to be when you grow up?"
Timmy: "I want to be an Astronaut!"
2011
Teacher: "And what do YOU want to be when you grow up?"
Timmy: "I want to work at Boeing!"
For optimal comment enjoyment, take red pill now.
Boeing has many test pilots on staff, and I'm sure that they will be the ones making the first few flights. Normally a civilian company test pilot makes the first flights of any new aircraft design before it is handed over to government / military test pilots for the follow-on phases of flight test and development. NASA was more of an exception than the rule because they had their astronauts make the first flights of previous space capsules / shuttles. But if memory serves me correctly, the first flights of the X-15 were made by company test pilots before NASA pilots flew it.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
The first two unmanned flights will be crewed by interns. The third is the manned one with actual Boeing employees.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
This should be ready to service the ISS about the time it is scheduled to be crash landed.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
One of the things the shuttle could do that most other spacecraft couldn't is to bring stuff down from space. Apparently the spooks liked this feature...
If nobody needed this feature, they wouldn't need all the crap you mentioned. Could send stuff to space way cheaper.
I wonder how many times this feature was used. Any idea ?
In the not-too-distant future --
Next Sunday, A.D. --
There was a guy named Joel,
Not too different than you or me.
He worked in a satellite loading bay,
Just polishing switches to pay his way;
He did his job well with a cheerful face,
But his bosses didn't like him
So they shot him into spaaaaaaaaace......
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
Your right about fixed costs, but there is more to it than that. Energetically, it makes no sense to lift so much material into orbit and then not leave it there to grow humankind's presence in space. Rockets with maximum to-orbit payload sizes with tiny return capsules make more sense. The shuttle might make sense if energy was 10X -100X cheaper than it was, and it might be someday... And it probably was cheaper relatively when the shuttle was designed.
But even with cheap energy, the shuttle program also only makes sense if rockets were hard to build, but they are easier to build than shuttles because they are simpler and don't need to withstand re-entry. The shuttle needed so much overhauling every trip anyway it might even have just been cheaper to make a new one anyway, since it often cheaper to make something new than to remake something old with testing. Maybe someday we'll have Star Trek shuttlecraft, but we aren't there yet.
Laser launch stuff seems interesting...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
More like they wonder why we took a forty year detour down a blind alley.
Welcome to the enrichment center. Since making test participation mandatory for all employees, the quality of our test subjects has risen dramatically. Employee retention, however, has not. As a result, you may have heard we're gonna phase out human testing. There's still a few things left to wrap up though - first up, conversion gel. Now, the beancounters told me we literally could not afford to buy $7 worth of moon rocks, much less 70 million. Bought 'em anyway. Ground them up, mixed them into a gel, and guess what: ground-up moon rocks are pure poison.
Because if it didn't have wings then a USAF couldn't use it.
Yes, that is one of the overwelming reasons the orbiter has wings. The USAF paid for part of it and as a result of the Key West Accords with the Army the USAF could only command things that fly with wings. So as such the #1 priority for the USAF in the design is that it have wings.
Yes it is silly.
A couple of times.
Once to retrieve a couple of commercial communications satellites whose boost motors misfired -- they were brought back, refurbed and relaunched.
Another time to retrieve the (extremely) Long Duration Exposure Facility, a flying testbed to research the effect of space exposure on various materials and objects (including tomato seeds). It stayed up a couple years longer than originally planned when the Challenger disaster pushed the schedule back.
There may have been others, but that's what comes to mind.
Of course you don't really need wings to do that either. A large capsule with a heat shield and parachutes would do. (Picture something like the way the LM was housed in the upper stage of the Saturn V (although never intended to return to Earth), or Spectre's fictional spaceship-nabber in the Bond movie You Only Live Twice.
-- Alastair
Other people in this thread were speculating the Boeing would be working interns 18 hours a day for free to compete for the chance to be selected to go on the CST.
I know they were being sarcastic, but I also know that a lot of American companies expect students to work for free for "internships." It's a nasty, exploitative practice that's starting to spread to the UK.
As for socialism, since when was working for free to let a rich person get richer ever a good idea? I don't understand why the USA insists of protecting a system that lets the super-rich get richer while the workers at the bottom (white- and blue-collar) become increasingly over-worked and poorer.
That's a problem that can be fixed without Socialism, but the foaming-at-the-mouth types refuse to acknowledge that.
America could be great it it wanted too, but the political bigots will make sure that doesn't happen.
Signed, A. Eurocommie.
Stick Men
This MIT class on the shuttle is very interesting. It appears that if done today the shuttle would have been able to perform much closer to its promises because they could have put diagnostics into the engines and saved themselves from having to take them out after every launch.
Will they fire you? It's not like they can go and replace you with an unpaid intern when you file a complaint with the gov't.