It looks like the commercial crew capsule that Boeing and Bigelow Aerospace are developing with a little NASA seed money finally has a name: the CST-100.
That little news nugget was divulged by Robert Bigelow in a Commercial Spaceflight Federation press release announcing that his aerospace company is now a full-fledged member of the Washington-based trade group.
The June 16 press release quotes Bigelow saying he’s “appalled by the condemnation of commercial crew as being somehow less safe than government programs, and the refrain that commercial companies need to prove they can deliver cargo before they deliver crew.”
Bigelow Aerospace has launched two inflatable space modules to date and is currently working on a third that’s designed to accommodate crew. Boeing and Bigelow announced last year that they are collaborating on a capsule to carry crews to Bigelow’s planned space hotel. In February, NASA agreed to invest $18 million i n the Boeing-Bigelow partnership.
As Bigelow put it in the release:
“The product of this relationship, the CST-100 capsule, will represent the safest, most reliable, and most cost-effective spacecraft ever to fly. Again, I don’t understand the critics who say ‘commercial’ entities can’t safely build a capsule. Why is it that Boeing, the company that constructed the [international space station] itself, can’t safely build a capsule that would go to their own space station? These are the sorts of questions and issues that we will be posing in Washington as a member of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.”
READ IT AT: [Commercial Spaceflight Federation]
