Buying rides to space isn’t anything new now — in fact, flying in something so old-fashioned as a ‘capsule’ on a ‘rocket’ is probably a little passé. But that hasn’t stopped Boeing from sticking a tourist seat into its new NASA-funded spacecraft.
On the back of yesterday’s announcement that Boeing has won a $US4.2bn NASA contract to fly astronauts up to the International Space Station, a Boeing spokesperson has confirmed that one of the seats on Boeing’s CST-100 Space Capsule will be reserved for budding space cadets, with Program Manager John Mulholland telling Reuters that “part of our proposal into NASA would be flying a Space Adventures spaceflight participant up to the ISS”.
The price will reportedly be ‘competitive’ with what Russia charges to fly tourists up to the ISS at the moment — in other words, somewhere north of $US50 million (although there’s no word on whether or not Boeing will be including the in-flight vodka). [Reuters]