Airplane builder Boeing Co. and Space Adventures, Ltd. will partner to offer trips into low earth orbit (LEO) on Boeing commercial crew spacecraft.
Space Adventures will market leftover seats on commercial flights aboard the Boeing Crew Space Transportation-100 (CST-100) spacecraft to anyone willing to foot the bill. Boeing plans to use the CST-100 to provide crew transportation to the International Space Station (ISS) and future commercial LEO platforms.
“To date, all commercial flights for private spaceflight participants to the ISS have been contracted by Space Adventures. If NASA and the international partners continue to accommodate commercial spaceflight participants on ISS, this agreement will be in concert with the NASA administrator’s stated intent to promote space commerce in low Earth orbit,” said Brewster Shaw, vice president and general manager of Boeing’s Space Exploration division.
Boeing and Space Adventures have not yet set a price per seat for spaceflight participants, but will do so when full-scale development is under way. Boeing continues to advance its design for the CST-100 spacecraft under NASA’s Commercial Crew Development Space Act Agreement.
The spacecraft, which can carry seven people, will fly on multiple launch vehicles and is expected to be operational by 2015.
Space Adventures, headquartered in Vienna, Va., provides orbital spaceflight opportunities to the world marketplaceand its clients have spent more than 2,000 hours in space, traveling 35 million miles.
A unit of The Boeing Co. and headquartered in St. Louis, Boeing Defense, Space & Security is a $34 billion business with 68,000 employees worldwide.
