Boeing and Space Adventures have joined forces to offer "affordable" travel to low Earth orbit for private space tourists. A memorandum of agreement between the two companies could see flights on-board the Boeing Crew Space Transportation-100 (CST-100) spacecraft from 2015.
Space Adventures plans to market the commercial seats to private individuals, businesses and U.S federal agencies other than NASA.
"With our customer experience and Boeing's heritage in human spaceflight, our goal is not only to benefit the individuals who fly to space, but also to help make the resources of space available to the commercial sector by bringing the value from space back to Earth,” said Eric Anderson, co-founder and chairman of Space Adventurers.
Boeing is working to advance the current design for the CST-100 spacecraft inline with NASA’s Commercial Crew Development Space Act. The CST-100 (the "100" means 100 kilometers from the ground to low Earth orbit) can carry a crew of seven and will be able to launch on a variety of different rockets, including Atlas, Delta and Falcon. The CST-100 is anticipated to start low Earth orbit flights as soon as 2015.
Vienna based Space Adventures is currently the only company to offer orbital spaceflight opportunities to private individuals. Flights include orbital missions (at a multi-million dollar price-point) and flights to the edge of space. To date Space Adventurers’ passengers have spent over 2,000 hours in space and covered over 35 million miles (65 million kms).
The two companies are yet to publish a price per seat for the spaceflights, but we hope it's competitive with Virgin Galactic's expected $200K fare.
Via Space Adventures.