Boeing's new spaceship for tourists

Seen above is an illustration of Boeing's proposed Crew Space Transportation-100 (CST-100) capsule docking with the International Space Station. Boeing intends to use the capsule to shuttle NASA astronauts and space tourists to low Earth orbit destinations including the ISS and perhaps a commercial space lab planned by Bigelow Aerospace. For the space tourism side, Boeing has partnered with Space Adventures, the organization that already books civilian trips to the ISS on Soyuz rockets at $40 million/ticket. (In 2007, I interviewed Charles Simonyi who had such a great time up there that he went twice.) From Smithsonian Air & Space:

“The price should be less emphasized than safety and reliability,” said Eric Anderson, co-founder and chairman of Space Adventures of Vienna, Virginia, which has so far sent seven people to the ISS on eight Soyuz flights (one person, Charles Simonyi, flew twice). “We’re still talking tens of millions of dollars. People ask me, when is it going to get cheaper, like $40,000? I always say it’ll never be $40,000 if it doesn’t start at $40 million. We’ll get there. The problem is, there’s not enough access to space.”

The training to fly on the new Boeing capsule will be “much less arduous,” Anderson said, than what is now required to ride on a Soyuz. For one thing, there won’t be a need for Russian language training, which takes several months in Russia. And the CST-100 will launch from Florida’s balmy Cape Canaveral atop an Atlas V, Delta IV, or SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, rather than from the barren steppes of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

"Boeing's New Spaceship"

• [bassplayinben]

  Space shuttle “terribad” ? Please grow up. Give an actual educated analysis of the flaws inherent in the system instead of writing the entire thing off as “terribad” “albatross”.

  Shuttle is still the most advanced and capable spacecraft ever built. 30 years later, no one has come close to reproducing its abilities.

  • [Brainspore]

    Nobody would have come close to reproducing the abilities of the Wright flyer either if they had stopped building airplanes in 1906.

    The Shuttle was a grand engineering effort but we’ve learned a lot over the last few decades and it’s time to move on to something better. A 1-in-60 chance of total crew loss is not an acceptable safety record if human spaceflight is to become routine.

• [Cochituate]

  Being Boeing, I would expect to have to run a bribe in order to ride, but I would expect that the other markets (SpaceX or LM) will not require such a thing. I still need to run the Powerball Lottery before I can ride with any of these folks, so I can’t complain too much. The more sources, the better the chance I have of ever riding to orbit.

• [Anonymous]

  I hope the first to fly on top of American rockets will get beta test discounts! Soyuz is very reliable for human flight (more than 100 flights to date, and no deadly accident since 1971).

• [Beelzebuddy]

  Over the years I’ve warmed somewhat to the idear of space tourism. Any large enterprise based on jet setting tourists is only one recession away from collapse (hello, Dubai!), but as Charles says, the biggest bottleneck to large scale space exploration is access. Once you’re in orbit there’s any number of exploitable resources in easy reach, but first you’ve got to put a lot of shit in orbit to make it affordable. So when the world hits another big recession, or when Space is no longer the Place, all those orbiting hotels and zero-g love shacks can be recycled into long term infrastructure, assuming they were designed with that in mind to begin with.

  • [sapere_aude]

    I have no objection whatsoever if a private firm or consortium, using only private funds, places its own space hotel in orbit and launches wealthy tourists to that hotel aboard its own space launch vehicles, launched from its own private spaceport, with no costs passed on to taxpayers. But I do not want to see the ISS become a tourist destination for über-rich egomaniacs who believe (apparently with some justification) that their wealth entitles them to special privileges, and that anything can be bought if you’re willing and able to pay the price. The ISS is supposed to be a scientific platform, crewed by highly-trained, professional astronauts/cosmonauts. I don’t want some tourist up there taking up space, consuming scarce resources, getting in the way of the work being done, posing a potential safety risk, etc., especially when the ISS is payed for, in part, by my tax dollars, with the understanding that it will be used as a public good for the benefit of all mankind, not as a private playground for rich tourists who have grown bored with their “jet set” lifestyle and want to upgrade to a “rocket set” lifestyle.

    • [Beelzebuddy]

      I wouldn’t wish for that either. But if wishes were horses, we’d all be eating steak. Forty million dollars can buy a LOT of steak.

      It is a sad fact of modern society that noble-minded science done for the good of all mankind has a hard time getting any mankind to pay for it. Space has an especially bad outlook precisely because of the high cost to orbit. People tend to argue that any amount of money spent on experiments to sort tiny screws in space is a waste compared to equally useful research done on Earth (climate change, humanitarian stuff, etc), and they’re right. $0.95 out of every dollar goes straight into launch costs. Enter space tourism, and economies of scale.

      If we can put people into orbit relatively cheaply, we can ship up more stuff for the same cost. More people. More equipment. More science. With just the ISS alone, we’ll never get there. It’ll always be barely scraping by on minimal congressional funding, until one day the bill won’t pass and whoops, there goes the space program. But with tourism, that’s a revenue stream independent of lobbyist opinion.

      People want to go to space. Some people are willing and able to pay exorbitant amounts of money to get there. Right now, that’s what we need. More people, more launches, whatever the reason. I’m willing to sacrifice some of the noble humanistic integrity of our current space endeavors to assure their continued existence.

      • [Antinous / Moderator]

        I’ll take Tang over steak any day.

      • [sapere_aude]

        Perhaps. But, if we’re going to let tourists go to the ISS just to raise money to keep the space program going, why not defer some of America’s defense costs by renting out the U.S. Marine Corps for a day to some eccentric billionaire who wants to fulfill his lifelong fantasy of reenacting the Iwo Jima landing? After all, it would be good training for the Marines; and the funds could be used to buy needed equipment. Or perhaps we could use Navy aircraft carriers as cruise ships for rich folks who want to pretend to be Top Gun fighter pilots. Or we could rent out the East Room of the White House for birthday parties, bar mitzvahs, and weddings for the wealthiest Americans. Why not sell advertising space on the side of the Washington Monument? Or allow some rich dude to pay to have his face carved into Mt. Rushmore? Or auction off some of the historical documents in the National Archives to private collectors?

        I’m not saying that the revenue raised by doing these things wouldn’t come in handy — in fact, it might relieve at least some of the burden on taxpayers — but there is a matter of principle involved here that has to trump mere pecuniary interests. Some things simply should not be for sale. Things that are the common property of the people should be used only for the common good of the people, not for the self-gratification of a privileged few. Everyone, including the richest of the rich, ought to be free to spend their legitimately earned wealth any way they choose so long as they aren’t harming anyone; but the government ought not to grant special privileges to the rich that are not available to the poor. If the rich want to become amateur astronauts, let them build their own rockets and space stations (or let them rent these things from private firms). But the government should not be in the business of satisfying the frivolous whims of a pampered elite, no matter how much they’re willing to pay.

        • [Beelzebuddy]

          Ah slippery slopes. What would the internets be without them.

          I shall counter your fallacy with one of my own. Do you know who else was against corporate influence in space? STALIN! You don’t want to be like Stalin, do you?

          But srsly now, I like that you have principles that, in principle, are never worth betraying. It’s cute. I find that in practice, a practical approach using principled ideals outperforms principled action alone. I wonder how far you are willing to stretch your idealism?

          Consider that right now we’re in a pretty vicious cycle: there are extremely few space tourists because there’s no mass space travel and no space hotels; there is no mass space travel and no space hotels because there are extremely few space tourists. Meanwhile NASA gets its funding cut every few years, the Shuttle’s on its last legs (and good fucking riddance to that albatross), but with no good replacement in sight, our options for orbit are going to be *very* limited.

          The best thing to do, speaking from the perspective of a principled taxpayer and not that of the giant space nerd I know myself to be, would be to cut our losses, pull our astronauts back to earth while we still can, and wait until we have a practical and affordable plan with a newly-designed launch vehicle that lacks everything which made the shuttle terribad. Meanwhile we can funnel the money that would have gone toward adding a fifth or sixth nine of safety into other projects for which we got principles. Like the army, or navy, or Mount Rushmore.

          Should we cancel the space program entirely until space tourism can make it competitively affordable, and focus on other goals instead?

          Antinous: I’ve never tried Tang over steak. Tang over duck sounds very tasty though.

        • [sapere_aude]

          Ah straw men. What would the internets be without them. ;-)

          As I’m sure you know, I was not making a slippery slope argument. I was making a reductio ad absurdum argument, which is not the same thing. (And your Stalin example wasn’t a slippery slope argument, either. It was a guilt by association argument.)

          And, by the way, I consider myself a principled pragmatist: Our principles ought to dictate what ends we will seek and what means are to be considered “out of bounds”; but we ought to be pragmatic about choosing what specific means we will use to achieve those ends, within the boundaries set by our principles. For me, letting rich folks buy special privileges from the government that are not available to ordinary citizens is out of bounds. For you, it might not be. That’s a reasonable difference of opinion; and neither position is inherently “right” or “wrong”. Though I would argue that my position is more in keeping with the founding ideals of a nation that began with the declaration that “all men are created equal”.

          Oh, and we already have a perfectly functional space launch vehicle. It’s called the Soyuz; and it’s the most reliable space launch vehicle the world has ever produced. (Okay, sure, it’s not an American space launch vehicle; but, being a pragmatist, I don’t care. As long as we can use it, and it gets the job done, I’m fine with it.) I’m perfectly happy to keep using the Soyuz until we can come up with a breakthrough new design that will drastically cut the cost of space travel, or that can send manned missions beyond LEO with reasonable safety and for a reasonable price tag. But, if we have to mothball the manned space program for a few decades until we can come up with a better approach, I’m fine with that, too. We get more bang for the buck from unmanned missions, anyway.

        • [Michael Smith]

          The one thing really going for Soyuz is that a working configuration was frozen decades ago. With less change, there is less to break. Apollo was a good, working system which the US threw away in favour of the brittle Space Shuttle.

          I am prepared to bet that if the US had continued to fly Apollo it would have the same excellent safety record, with better performance to boot.

    • [sapere_aude]

      Oops!

      *paid for

      (Eye kant spel)

• [RedSun]

  Any excitement I would have had over going into space (whether it is low orbit or not) has been killed by Mary Roach. Now I just think, “Why would I want to do something so expensive, but so tedious?”.

• [Stefan Jones]

  I also hear that the American verson of the bags you shit in while in microgravity are much more comfortable than that Russian version.

• [Anonymous]

  Is anyone else worried about readily giving up the ultimate “high ground” to the same corporations that are currently riding us like we’re hobby horses?

• [Anonymous]

  So they’re using the same old Apollo method of staged rockets after all. I guess the shuttle thing was a bust. Who’s crazy recycling idea was that anyway? Damned chubby looking plane dimmed my youthful interest in being an astronaut entirely.

• [aj]

  I see they will have Economy Class seats. Will you have to pay extra for a zero gravity beer and snack box?

• [Anonymous]

  Space; the final affront.

  DC

• [Brainspore]

  It’s a shame that getting human beings into space using present technology takes such a huge expenditure of resources. I wonder what the carbon footprint is for a largely-disposable rocket ship and a few swimming pools’ worth of rocket fuel.