Boeing announced Wednesday that it is entering the spaceflight market in partnership with the Virginia-based Space Adventures.
The agreement includes marketing passenger seats on commercial flights aboard the Boeing Crew Space Transportation-100 spacecraft. The spacecraft is being designed to travel to the International Space Station as well as other future private space stations.
“By combining our talents, we can better offer safe, affordable transportation to commercial spaceflight customers,” Brewster Shaw, vice president and general manager of Boeing’s Space Exploration division, said in a statement. “To date, all commercial flights for private spaceflight participants to the ISS have been contracted by Space Adventures.”
The Washington Post reports that “Boeing has been developing a capsule and has years of experience building rockets, while Space Adventures has organized seven trips to the space station aboard the Russian spacecraft Soyuz. The obstacles remain high, but the two companies say they think they can begin their service by the end of 2015.”
In February, Boeing received a $50 million grant from NASA to work on commercial transport of space station crew and the development of human spaceflight. The capsule seats could go to space tourists, individual companies or other non-government groups, as well as U.S. federal agencies other than NASA.
The first test flights of the new CST-100 space capsule are scheduled to launch by 2015, Boeing officials said. The capsule is designed to ride atop an expendable rocket.
