Government extortion wins! Boeing has agreed to concessions to its Washington state union in order to settle their NLRB suit over Boeing’s new South Carolina plant.
Building Boeing’s CST-100 manned capsule, the smart way.
From pressure seals used on the international space station to rendezvous and docking sensors developed for the Pentagon’s Orbital Express experiment, Boeing is drawing heavily on heritage space and aviation programs for its proposed CST-100 commercial human spacecraft.
Cheaper also.
Most curious: General Electric, whose CEO is a strong Obama backer, gets no flack from the NLRB for building an aircraft factory in a right-to-work state.
When it came to Boeing, however, which is not a strong Obama backer, the NLRB has done everything it can to interfere.
Boeing has leased a now unused shuttle hanger from NASA for its CST-100 manned ferry.
Boeing’s private space capsule has passed its wind tunnel tests.
Fighting forest fires, with water balloons.
More on making the X-37B an ISS supply and crew ferry.
An update on the ongoing X-37B mission.
I like this quote from the article:
Meanwhile, Boeing has begun to look at derivatives of their X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle — including flying cargo and crew to the International Space Station. Speaking this week at the Space 2011 conference —organized by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and held in Long Beach, Calif. — Arthur Grantz of Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems sketched out a host of future uses for the space plane design. For one, the X-37B, as is, can be flown to the space station and dock to the facility’s common berthing mechanism. No new technology is required for X-37B to supply cargo services to the ISS, Grantz said. Also, an X-37C winged vehicle has been scoped out, a craft that would ride atop an Atlas 5 in un-shrouded mode.
The Boeing roadmap, Grantz added, also envisions a larger derivative of the X-37B space plane, one that can carry up to seven astronauts, as well as tote into Earth orbit a mix of pressurized and unpressurized cargo.
On Monday Bigelow and Boeing completed successful drop tests in the Mohave Desert of airbags to be used during landings of the Boeing manned capsule. With video.
Both the FAA and European regulators have certified Boeing’s new 787 airplane for its first commercial flight
Boeing unveiled its 787 Dreamliner airplane on Saturday after years of delay.
Boeing has now officially chosen the Atlas 5 rocket to launch is manned capsule.
The Atlas 5 is the rocket that Boeing, Blue Origin, and Sierra Nevada plan to use to get astronauts into orbit.
Chris Bergin at NASAspaceflight.com today wrote a report on the four companies NASA is subsidizing to build manned capsules. The status of each company tells us something of whether they can eventually provide the United States with a replacement for the shuttle, and do it soon. Let’s take a look at each.
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In picking the winners for its commercial manned space subsidizes, NASA gave more priority to the spacecraft — either capsules or spaceplane — above the rockets needed to launch it.
Government gone wild: The National Labor Relations Board wants to shut down a Boeing plant because it happens to be in a right-to-work state.
NASA has awarded the next set of commercial crew development agreements, giving contracts worth from $22 to $92 million to four companies, Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada, SpaceX, and Boeing. More here and here.
The amounts that NASA is giving these companies is minuscule, compared the monies spent on the program-formerly-called-Constellation. Yet I bet they all get their rockets/capsules launched and in operation, supplying cargos and crews to low Earth orbit, before NASA even test fires its heavy-lift rocket.
Boeing moves forward on its commercial manned capsule.
Dreamliner: a nightmare for Boeing.
Boeing’s biggest-ever plane makes its maiden flight.
