If you’re looking to one day spend your summers aboard the scenic International Space Station, your travel options are steadily growing. Now, Boeing has unveiled new interior shots of its next-gen commercial spacecraft, the CST-100.
And although one of its main competitors, SpaceX, may have the benefit of having been in the space game for longer, Boeing’s got a significant edge when it comes to knowing what passengers want in luxurious interior design. It’s been doing it forever, after all.
Boeing recruited Bigelow Aerospace to help out with the capsule’s exterior, which totals just under 4.5m. And squeezed into that little space is room for up to seven total passengers (or a mix of passengers and cargo).
With a non-pro crew comes a spacecraft that is significantly less complicated to navigate — at least as far as space vehicles go. As Chris Ferguson, director of Boeing’s Crew and Mission Operations and a former astronaut told NASA:
What you’re not going to find is 1,100 or 1,600 switches. When these guys go up in this, they’re primary mission is not to fly this spacecraft, they’re primary mission is to go to the space station for six months. So we don’t want to burden them with an inordinate amount of training to fly this vehicle. We want it to be intuitive.
You still have a bit to wait. Boeing’s first CST-100 flight isn’t set to take off until 2017. And it’s going to be one hell of a classy ride. [Boeing via Business Insider]