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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.
Are you kidding me? I would jump at the opportunity for an internship that is going to give me time in space!
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.
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?
Post-Constellation, we're not. The current NASA plan is to develop a heavy lift launcher capable of manned missions to unspecified targets such as the moon/mars/asteroids.
Unspecified missions to unspecified targets that will never happen so long as most of NASA's budget is being wasted on a jobs program... sorry, heavy lift launcher.
Atlas is a fine ride to LEO but you need something larger to go farther.
That's like saying you need a bigger spacecraft than the shuttle to build a space station because Skylab was launched on a Saturn V. In reality you split the payload into smaller sized chunks and launch them on something far more cost-effective than a NASA boondoggle that will cost billions of dollars every time it flies because it only does so once a year and needs 10,000 people to prepare it for launch. Most of the mass you need to put into orbit for a long-range spacecraft is fuel, which can easily be split across multiple launches.
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!
Sorry, couldn't resist.
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.