New Boeing Spaceship Targets Commercial Missions
The new Boeing space capsule is a project using the company's recent $18 million award from NASA to advance the concepts and technology necessary to build a commercial crew space transportation system. It is one of several efforts by different U.S. companies to come with new spaceships to fill the void left by NASA's retiring shuttles.
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And so far, things have been progressing right on schedule, said Keith Reiley, Boeing's Commercial Crew Development Program Manager. "We're right on schedule for all of our demonstrations," Reiley told SPACE.com. "We've done 50 to 60 percent of our milestones, and all of them have been on time or ahead of time." Boeing's new spaceship At the heart of Boeing's new spaceship design is the CST-100 capsule, which will look similar to the cone-shaped Apollo and Orion spacecraft. The Apollo capsules were built to ferry astronauts between Earth and lunar orbit in the late 1960s and 1970s. The larger Orion vehicles were part of NASA's Constellation program to return astronauts to the moon, and are now slated to serve as a space station lifeboat. "It's a little smaller than Orion, but a little bigger than Apollo," Reiley said of the CST-100 spacecraft. "It carries seven, but it's fairly small – it's not as large or as spacious as the Orion." The capsule is being built for short missions to the space station, meaning it will not be designed to stay in space for long periods of time. |
Source: New Boeing Spaceship Targets Commercial Missions
