{"id":37828,"date":"2011-08-07T15:45:14","date_gmt":"2011-08-07T15:45:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/decision-day-for-cst-100%e2%80%b2s-ride-to-orbit\/"},"modified":"2011-08-07T15:45:14","modified_gmt":"2011-08-07T15:45:14","slug":"decision-day-for-cst-100%e2%80%b2s-ride-to-orbit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/space-flight\/decision-day-for-cst-100%e2%80%b2s-ride-to-orbit.php","title":{"rendered":"Decision day for CST-100?s ride to orbit"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"CST-100<\/a>

Illustration of Boeing's proposed CST-100 commercial crew capsule.<\/p><\/div>

Since unveiling its plans for developing a commercial crew spacecraft, Boeing has emphasized that its CST-100 spacecraft was launch vehicle agnostic: it could launch on an Atlas 5, Delta 4, or Falcon 9. And when ATK announced its plans in February for the Liberty launch vehicle<\/a>, Boeing officials added it to the roster of vehicles compatible with the capsule. Now, however, the company plans to focus its attention on a single rocket.<\/p>

At a media teleconference scheduled for noon Eastern time today, Boeing officials will announce the formal selection of the vehicle that will be used for the CST-100′s test flights in 2015 and operational missions to the ISS and other orbital destinations. This downselect is not surprising: at an April briefing, CST-100 program manager John Elbon said that they would select a specific vehicle<\/a> to “really lay out the abort scenarios” and details associated with them.<\/p>

The clear favorite in this vehicle competition is the Atlas 5. Two other Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) awardees, Blue Origin and Sierra Nevada, have already picked the Atlas 5 to launch their crewed spacecraft, and ULA has an unfunded CCDev agreement with NASA to continue work on human-rating that launcher. ULA also offers the Delta 4, which does have Boeing heritage, but does not appear to be the subject of active human-rating work. Falcon 9 would require Boeing to depend on a competitor, SpaceX, for its launcher, while ATK’s Liberty, unlike the other three, isn’t flying yet, raising the question of whether it would be ready by mid-decade or not.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Illustration of Boeing's proposed CST-100 commercial crew capsule.Since unveiling its plans for developing a commercial crew spacecraft, Boeing has emphasized that its CST-100 spacecraft was launch vehicle agnostic: it could launch on an Atlas 5, Delta 4, or Falcon 9. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space-flight"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37828"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37828\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}