Aviation Industry Future : Boeing Plans to Sell Seats On 2015 Space Flight

The Boeing Co. said Wednesday that it was entering the space tourism business, an announcement that could bolster the Obama administration’s efforts to transform NASA into an agency that focuses less on building rockets and more on nurturing a commercial space industry.

Boeing — which is developing a capsule that it hopes will take NASA astronauts to the International Space Station and on Tuesday was awarded a five-year, $1.2 billion extension of its contract with NASA covering engineering work on the station — announced that it will offer for sale any seats that NASA does not need. Boeing officials said their first flight is aimed for 2015.

The entrance of an aerospace giant like Boeing perhaps marks the transition of space tourism from a fanciful pursuit of startup entrepreneurs to a mainstream aerospace market.

“We’re ready now to start talking to prospective customers,” said Eric Anderson , co-founder and chairman of Space Adventures Ltd. , a Virginia-based space tourism company that would market the seats for Boeing.

Current NASA plans call for four space station crew members to travel on each flight. The Boeing capsule, called the CST-100 , would have room for seven, leaving perhaps three seats available for space tourists.

Boeing and Space Adventures have not set a price yet. Anderson said the cost would be competitive with the Soyuz flights. Guy Laliberté , founder of Cirque du Soleil, spent about $40 million for a Soyuz trip to the space station last year.

But the prospects that anyone who buys a ticket will ever get to space hinge on Congress, which is considering two versions of a bill that support very different visions for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

A bill written by the House’s science and technology committee to lay out the direction of NASA for the next three years would largely follow the traditional trajectory for human space flight.

The bill calls for NASA to build a government-owned rocket — probably the Ares I , which NASA has been working on for five years — to transport astronauts to the International Space Station.

The competing vision, embodied in President Barack Obama’s 2011 budget proposal for NASA, focuses instead on nurturing private companies that want to develop the space equivalent of airlines. NASA would then simply buy seats on those rockets to send its astronauts to the International Space Station.

Competition, the thinking goes, would drive down the cost of getting to space, leading to a profitable new American industry and freeing more of NASA’s budget for the deep-space missions.

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Boeing Company, Thursday, announced it would test-fly its 787 Dreamliner later this year but disappointed customers by delaying delivery of the plane until the fourth quarter of 2010.

Wall Street cheered the announcement as Boeing’s stock soared more than 6% in New York trading after the company said it still expects the 787 to be profitable.
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