Tag Archives: Boeing

Commercial Crew Update

Originally published on Jan 16, 2017 | NASA Commentator Kyle Herring talks with Kathy Lueders, the manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, about the status of efforts to develop commercial space vehicles to deliver human crew members to the International Space Station. NASA is working with Boeing and SpaceX as those companies work through milestones to get their vehicles, Boeing’s CST-100 and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, ready for their first crewed flights to the station, while the space station program is reconfiguring the station and preparing for spacewalks to install the new International Docking Adapters to which the new commercial spacecraft will dock.

Although YouTube states that the above video was published this month, I suspect that it was actually recorded two years ago in mid-June 2015. Reason being that reference was made in the video (@6:20) of the upcoming launch of the International Docking Adapter (IDA-1). However IDA-1 was lost during the launch failure of SpX CRS-7 on June 28, 2015.  (Reference https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Docking_Adapter)

Additionally the Crew Dragon Pad Abort occurred in May of 2015.

Boeing Blue

Elon Musk and SpaceX aren’t the only ones with their “eyes on the prize” of replacing the Shuttle for commercial U.S manned space launches. Boeing has unveiled a new streamlined light-weight space suit for it astronauts to wear aboard its CST-100 “Space Taxi”.

See also my post Bras In Space, the story of the Apollo spacesuit

Compare and contrast the Boeing CST-100 to the SpaceX Crew Dragon (aka Dragon V2)

The Near Future of Space Travel

An Essay

This week saw the crash and burn of two commercial space ships; one manned, the other unmanned. Regardless of how commonplace spaceflight seems to have become it is still dangerous business. As Elon Musk quipped when a SpaceX test vehicle self-destructed (as intended) when something went haywire over the McGregor Texas test site, “Rockets are tricky“.

Continue reading The Near Future of Space Travel

A Brief History of Mars

Copyright © 2014 by Christian Bergman, All rights reserved.

All people, places, and events are fictional … except when they aren’t.

• • •

In the distant past, a forgotten shepherd stares up at the sky, studying the bright red dot that drifts night to night among the background of stars.

20140805-203000-73800544.jpg

Continue reading A Brief History of Mars

We Choose To Go To The Moon

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

President John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1962, speaking to incoming freshman students at Rice University, Houston, Texas

Continue reading We Choose To Go To The Moon

EELV: The Right to Compete

20140530-143132-52292307.jpg

From http://www.spacex.com/press/2014/04/29/eelv-right-compete

EELV: The Right to Compete | SpaceX

On April 28, 2014, SpaceX filed a bid protest in the United States Court of Federal Claims to challenge the U.S. Air Force’s latest Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) contract with United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The long-term contract, which guarantees the purchase of 36 rocket cores from ULA to be used in national security launches, was granted to ULA on a sole-source basis without any competition from other launch providers.

Continue reading EELV: The Right to Compete