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Boeing new space taxi has special seat for a tourist

The $4.2 billion US, five-year contract
allows Boeing to sell rides to tourists, Boeing Commercial Crew Program
Manager John Mulholland told Reuters, adding that the price would be
competitive with what the Russian space agency now charges to fly
tourists to the orbital outpost.

"Part of our proposal into NASA would be flying a Space Adventures
spaceflight participant up to the ISS," Mulholland said, referring to a
Virginia-based space tourism company that brokers travel aboard Russian
Soyuz capsules.

Now that Boeing has won a share of NASA's space taxi contract, "we
hope … to start working with the ISS program to make it happen," he
said. "We think it would be important to help spur this industry."

Space Adventures is scheduled in January to begin training British
singer Sarah Brightman for a 10-day visit to the station, a trip costing
$52 million, according to Tom Shelley, president of Space Adventures.

Brightman is slated to become the eighth paying passenger to travel
to the station, a $100 billion US research complex that flies about 418
kilometres above Earth.

Boeing's first test launch of the taxi is not expected until 2017.

Commercial flights may also help Boeing's bottom line on a rare, fixed-price, government-backed development program.

Under the contract, Boeing is responsible for cost overruns and the
cost of delays. The aerospace company appears to be confident it can
produce the taxi without lowering the operating margin in its networks
and space business, which was 7.8 per cent last quarter.

But Boeing faces competition from rival Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, which also won a NASA contract and says it can develop the taxi for nearly 40 per cent less than Boeing.

SpaceX already plans to offer trips to tourists, but did not
immediately respond to questions about whether it would fly tourists on
its NASA missions.

The NASA contracts awarded on Tuesday to Boeing and SpaceX cover
design, building, testing their spaceship and up to six missions to fly
astronauts to the station, a pace of roughly two per year.
California-based SpaceX, owned and operated by technology entrepreneur
Elon Musk, says it can create and fly the taxi for $2.6 billion,
compared to Boeing's $4.2 billion bid.

"I think it's a vital next step in SpaceX's progress," Musk said in an interview on FOX Business Network.

Most of the price difference appears to be the rocket.

SpaceX's Dragon capsule will fly on the company's Falcon 9 boosters,
which cost about $61 million for satellite-delivery missions. Boeing's
CST-100 capsules will fly aboard Atlas 5 rockets, which are manufactured
and flown by United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin
Corp and Boeing. The rockets, which are powered by a Russian RD-180
engine, cost about $150 million apiece.

The taxi project appears to be well within Boeing's core space
capabilities, which suggests it will not have trouble meeting its cost
and schedule targets, analysts said.

"They're not pushing the envelope in terms of technology the way
SpaceX is" in developing a new rocket, said Ken Herbert, an analyst at
Canaccord Genuity in San Francisco. The contract revenue would hit
Boeing's income statement mostly in 2017 and 2018, he added.

Separately, Boeing and Lockheed announced on Wednesday that United
Launch Alliance would invest heavily in a new rocket engine being
developed by Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos and his private company
space company Blue Origin. The agreement is aimed at freeing the United
States from its dependency on Russian-made engines for rockets for
launches and is expected to have little effect on the space taxi.

Meanwhile, SpaceX has been aggressively exploiting the price
advantage of its American-made rocket to try to break ULA's monopoly on
launching the U.S. military's satellites. A lawsuit contesting the Air
Force's last contract with ULA is pending in a U.S. court.

The company also has been successfully wooing commercial satellite
launches, a business estimated to be worth $2.4 billion a year, a 2014
Satellite Industry Association study shows.

So far, the company's Falcon 9 rockets have flown 12 times, all
successfully. ULA's Atlas 5, which is mostly used by the U.S. military,
made its 49th successful flight late on Tuesday.