Boeing Employees To Man CST-100 Crew Capsule 77
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.
n00bs (Score:1, Insightful)
SpaceX, Dragon, Elon Musk. Nuff said.
Re:Interns? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This would be sweet... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.