Boeing Unveils Cabin Design For Commercial Spaceliner 74
Jeremiah Cornelius (137) writes " Did you enjoy your flight, Dr Heywood Floyd?" Boeing unveiled a new concept for the cabin of a future commercial spaceliner, based on the blue-lit Boeing "Sky" interior of the company's modern airliners, as well as work on the company's CST-100 space capsule. "Provided there is a destination for them out there, how will that passenger want to go back and forth?'" said Chris Ferguson, a former astronaut who commanded NASA's final space shuttle mission in 2011 and now serves as Boeing's director of crew and mission operations for the commercial crew program. Boeing developed the CST-100 capsule to compete for NASA's space station crew launch business after the agency retired its space shuttle fleet. The capsule is designed to launch on an expendable Atlas 5 rocket. NASA will be selecting one or more companies in August of this year, with the aim of reaching flight operations in 2017."
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Re:Talk (concepts) is cheap (Score:4, Insightful)
US tourism industry is worth about $126 billion/year, worldwide over $1 trillion. Don't underestimate joyrides.
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Also fun was watching the 250 lb. rider from the trip before us try to get out of the round hatch - she was stuck for a few minutes.
I also learned I have a *small* amount of claustrophobia.
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Oh? Compare the night sky in, say, Los Angeles to that on a mountain in the middle of nowhere on a clear night.
It's even -better- outside the atmosphere.
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What Boeing is proposing here is going to be for a little bit longer than 10 minutes.
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How about a selfie at the bottom of the ocean? Where's the tourist market for that?
You mean something like James Cameron [nationalgeographic.com] at the bottom of the Marianas Trench? There is also a pretty brisk business of people who are trying to get married on the deck of the Titanic [bbc.co.uk].... literally. Note the selfie in that last link in particular.
There actually is a pretty brisk tourism market for that..... so what are you talking about again? That space tourism won't happen until the underwater deep sea market for tourism is penetrated? Already happened.
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I don't know but 600 people have already paid and thousands more put their name down for a trip on Virgin Galactic at $250K a seat.
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Are you stupid? 600 * $250k = $150 million. That's not chump-change.
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Climbing Mount Everest can easily cost $35,000-$100,000+ per person, just for the necessary permit and guides, and yet the mountain is so crowded you often have to wait in line for hours to get past a choke point. Do you really think going into space will be so dramatically less appealing?
I agree that I fail to see the appeal of a simple suborbital hop, seems like you should at least get to circle the globe a couple times to really get the impact, but then again for the ticket price you do get to see Earth
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Oh, and let's put this in proper perspective - there's a lot of people in the world for whom a $250,000 ticket price is only a day or two's wages - I imagine they're the core audience to begin with. I don't know about you, but if I could go on a suborbital hop for even a week's wages I would be seriously tempted.
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If I could take a ride in a U2 spyplane I'd do it, for that matter.
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Even assuming they travel to the very upper limit of the stratosphere that's only ~30 miles up. The accepted "edge of space" in contrast is ~60 miles up, and there's no reason a suborbital hop has to stop there. That's going to increase the amount of the Earth's surface that you can see substantially. Yes, you could cruise around in a MiG until you've seen as much of the surface, but getting a larger overview is a qualitatively different experience.
angular distance from observer to horizon = asec( [radiu
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"Plus there's the whole free-fall and "I've been to space" component."
Once. Then what? I mean the Concorde had the "I flew faster than sound" aspect, and it flew somewhere, but even that died. Where is it now?
And you really think people are going to line up by the thousands to see "4x" of the Earth's surface... for the price of a house?
I've already seen the Earth from space, I have the Gemini photo album from NASA. From the 60s.
I flew on the Concorde. Worth it. If it hadn't died, I'd probably have done a few more trips over the years.
And yeah, thousands of people *will* pay that amount to go up that high.
You seem awfully jealous of people who can afford that kind of extravagance. Some of us do have the money. Hell, I'm paying about that kind of cash adding a room to my house... for the indoor pool.
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Climbing Mount Everest can easily cost $35,000-$100,000+ per person, just for the necessary permit and guides, and yet the mountain is so crowded you often have to wait in line for hours to get past a choke point. Do you really think going into space will be so dramatically less appealing?
Some people think the landfill we're turning Everest into is pretty cool, ya insensitive clod!
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Some people will pay good money [experiencedays.co.uk] to go up in a balloon for a few hours and drink champagne.
There is a new class of super-rich oligarchs who are concentrating vast amounts of the world's wealth in their own hands.
For our own economic survival, we need to take advantage of the "free" market and innovate ways of getting that wealth back into the economy, legitimately.
What could be better than fostering a high-tech, forward-looking industry of highly educated scientists and engineers to make the toys for these p
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Flying in this plane [imgur.com] was definitely about the vehicle [libertyfoundation.org], not the destination.
Re:Talk (concepts) is cheap (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, this is pretty clearly marketing. This is basically an "artist's rendition" of what the interior of such a space vehicle would look like. Needless to say, how to do interior design of the cabin is not really the biggest obstacle in the way of this vehicle existing.
Actually I think it might not even be marketing for their space arm, but cross-over marketing for their commercial airliner arm. Boeing has been rolling out their new "Sky interior" concept on new and refurbished planes, and there's a big branding push to make it have a positive/modern/advanced image in travelers' minds. Tying it in with some futuristic space-shuttle concept whose interior looks remarkably like the 787's interior could be part of that strategy.
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It looks like United Launch has been working on human rating the Atlas V and building a Crew Transportation System since 2006
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
I can only imagine that this sudden rush of PR is due to SpaceX's recent smear of UL for locking them out of the military space market
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I can only imagine that this sudden rush of PR is due to SpaceX's recent smear of UL for locking them out of the military space market
How about this was just something positive that the company could say about themselves? You don't need to look into conspiracy theories here, just simply that a bunch of Boeing engineers did something cool and decided to brag about it. That the timing also coincided with some negative publicity certainly could be a good thing for Boeing as well, but frankly they've been doing steady progress with this spacecraft anyway.
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By making up a quote that includes the name of a character from 2001, but isn't actually in Kubrick's film at all
FTFY.
Article Summary (Score:5, Funny)
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Boeing also shows interiors for its traditional airlines too... However I have never seen any of Boeings customers implement them either.
It really comes down to cost.
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Uh, lots of Boeing [boeing.com] customers use the Sky interior.
More than 85 percent of Boeing's backlog of more than 3,400 Next-Generation 737s and 737 MAXs will be delivered with the Boeing Sky Interior. The Boeing Sky Interior will be standard on the 737 MAX.
Designer Drawings Always Look So Good (Score:1)
Cost revisions later it's back spam in a can seating.
In other news... (Score:2)
Boeing is going to put people in space? (Score:2)
The company that will do it is most likely spacex. If they manage to make their rockets reusable, there might be no other launch companies left.
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If and when SpaceX becomes a stable and above all profitable enterprise there will be plenty of others who will get in the game. SpaceX is just doing the hard work upfront with their R&D and working out how to stream line the operational and safety procedures needed to support such a venture. As long as the government doesn't smother them with regulations and the governments version of standards they should be quite successful in the future.
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SpaceX is just doing the hard work upfront with their R&D
Dear God Almighty, SpaceX is not doing jack-shit R&D. The R&D was done 50 years ago, and documented in extraordinary detail by others.
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Really? Wow. Could you please provide a link or reference citation to the extraordinarily detailed documents describing the data obtained from the 50+ year-old R&D in flying rocket booster stages back to sea-level for a controlled powered landing, so they can be refuelled and reused with minimal-to-none teardown/rebuilding? Or the 50+ year-old R&D into combining a capsule launch escape system with a means of powered descent and soft-landing on land, removing the need for parachutes (except as emerge
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Cool! Thanks.
The Volksrocket project does look really fascinating, but there's not much about it. The Wikipedia entry calls it a "planned project", as cited in the linked "Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition"(!) article, and says (uncited) that it was tested through 1991, and reached 34km altitude at burnout (citation Omni article, which is not online, bah!) with no hint that it was capable of in-flight relight or that controlled descent was tested.
Googling for more info is a bit all over the p
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Although... the VolksRocket project wasn't started until after Evel Knievel's Snake River Canyon jump in Sep '74, making it at least a decade after the GP's "50 years ago" cut-off. If you've got anything else from '64 or earlier, I'd love to see that too.
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SpaceX is just doing the hard work upfront with their R&D
Dear God Almighty, SpaceX is not doing jack-shit R&D. The R&D was done 50 years ago, and documented in extraordinary detail by others.
I'd like to see the video or for that matter even a classified U.S. Army Air Corps document that has anybody from any country of the world (hell, even the Nazi's at their secret Antarctic base) do something like this 50 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwwS4YOTbbw [youtube.com]
Seriously?
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A lot of what SpaceX is doing was not done 50 years ago but more like 30 years ago. Often it was not done before in the US. One example would be the channel wall nozzle used in the Merlin 1D engine.
SpaceX also does some things which were not done before like the lightweight tanks they use which can keep its shape while empty. The stage design they use is a lot cheaper to manufacture than the stiffened isogrid construction used in the EELVs.
SpaceX does a lot more R&D than its detractors like to think.
Re: Boeing is going to put people in space? (Score:2)
Fat passengers (Score:2)
At least that's taken care of! (Score:2)
Now that we know what the decor of the interior will be like, the remainder of actually designing a working spacecraft with a useful mission is trivial. We're almost to Mars! Did anyone note that, in the linked article, they talk about providing passengers with a "large digital display"? You get a video feed, not a window. Is it just me, but does that take away most of the impact of the experience?
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Did you even read the article? I doubt it, based upon your response here. Most of your questions were answered in that article BTW.
As for the rest of the actual spaceship, it has already been built... at least the engineering prototypes. The launcher is going to be likely the Atlas V (assuming that the whole issue with Putin can be put to rest so the Russian engines can keep coming for that rocket). That has already done nearly a hundred launches so it is safe to assume it is in pretty good standing. T
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Built in the 70s.
How many of those engineers are still working there, forty to fifty years later?
They did get replacements for those engineers over the years. Ever hear about the Delta IV? It flew into space last month.
SNC Dream Chaser (Score:2)
The article has no mention of any competing ships. Odd omission, isn't it?
The 2001 reference is particularly off-target here, since Boing are developing a mere capsule while SNC are developing a proper spaceplane. Their Dream Chaser will subject its occupants to much less G-forces during reentry, will have greater cross-range landing capability, and even has hybrid rocket engines on board for on-orbit maneuvering and other uses (such as flying the ship away safely if there's a booster failure). Plus, the
Squeeze in more seats (Score:1)
Less work on flash, more work on rockets (Score:2)
I think Boeing needs to focus a little more on getting people/materials to space and a little less on the aesthetics of their cabin design. From what I gather the already high costs of their United Launch Alliance rockets for the DoD have increased 60% in the last few years. Some estimates put their launches at $380 Million each not including some of the fixed production/facilities maintenance (~$1B). SpaceX can launch the same payloads in the $56 - 90 Million per launch range.
Give us a break! (Score:2)
And you still won't be able to find the USB port.. (Score:2)