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 The $4.2 billion, five-year contract allows Boeing to sell rides
to tourists, Boeing Commercial Crew Program Manager John Mulholland
told Reuters, adding that the price would be competitive with what
the Russian space agency now charges to fly tourists to the orbital
outpost.
"Part of our proposal into NASA would be flying a Space Adventures
spaceflight participant up to the ISS," Mulholland said, referring
to a Virginia-based space tourism company that brokers travel aboard
Russian Soyuz capsules.
Now that Boeing has won a share of NASA's space taxi contract, "we
hope ... to start working with the ISS program to make it happen,"
he said. "We think it would be important to help spur this
industry."
Space Adventures is scheduled in January to begin training British
singer Sarah Brightman for a 10-day visit to the station, a trip
costing $52 million, according to Tom Shelley, president of Space
Adventures.
Brightman is slated to become the eighth paying passenger to travel
to the station, a $100 billion research complex that flies about 260
miles (418 km) above Earth.
Boeing's first test launch of the taxi is not expected until 2017.
BOTTOM LINE
Commercial flights may also help Boeing's bottom line on a rare,
fixed-price, government-backed development program.
Under the contract, Boeing is responsible for cost overruns and the
cost of delays. The aerospace company appears to be confident it can
produce the taxi without lowering the operating margin in its
networks and space business, which was 7.8 percent last quarter.
But Boeing faces competition from rival Space Exploration
Technologies, or SpaceX, which also won a NASA contract and says it
can develop the taxi for nearly 40 percent less than Boeing.
SpaceX already plans to offer trips to tourists, but did not
immediately respond to questions about whether it would fly tourists
on its NASA missions.
The NASA contracts awarded on Tuesday to Boeing and SpaceX cover
design, building, testing their spaceship and up to six missions to
fly astronauts to the station, a pace of roughly two per year.
California-based SpaceX, owned and operated by technology
entrepreneur Elon Musk, says it can create and fly the taxi for $2.6
billion, compared to Boeing's $4.2 billion bid.
"I think it's a vital next step in SpaceX's progress," Musk said in
an interview on FOX Business Network.
Most of the price difference appears to be the rocket.
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SpaceX's Dragon capsule will fly on the company's Falcon 9 boosters,
which cost about $61 million for satellite-delivery missions.
Boeing’s CST-100 capsules will fly aboard Atlas 5 rockets, which are
manufactured and flown by United Launch Alliance, a partnership of
Lockheed Martin Corp <LMT.N> and Boeing. The rockets, which are
powered by a Russian RD-180 engine, cost about $150 million apiece.
ON TARGET
The taxi project appears to be well within Boeing's core space
capabilities, which suggests it will not have trouble meeting its
cost and schedule targets, analysts said.
"They're not pushing the envelope in terms of technology the way
SpaceX is" in developing a new rocket, said Ken Herbert, an analyst
at Canaccord Genuity in San Francisco. The contract revenue would
hit Boeing's income statement mostly in 2017 and 2018, he added.
Separately, Boeing and Lockheed announced on Wednesday that United
Launch Alliance would invest heavily in a new rocket engine being
developed by Amazon.com Inc <AMZN.O> founder Jeff Bezos and his
private company space company Blue Origin. The agreement is aimed at
freeing the United States from its dependency on Russian-made
engines for rockets for launches and is expected to have little
effect on the space taxi.
Meanwhile, SpaceX has been aggressively exploiting the price
advantage of its American-made rocket to try to break ULA's monopoly
on launching the U.S. military's satellites. A lawsuit contesting
the Air Force's last contract with ULA is pending in a U.S. court.
The company also has been successfully wooing commercial satellite
launches, a business estimated to be worth $2.4 billion a year, a
2014 Satellite Industry Association study shows.
So far, the company's Falcon 9 rockets have flown 12 times, all
successfully. ULA's Atlas 5, which is mostly used by the U.S.
military, made its 49th successful flight late on Tuesday.
(Reporting by Irene Klotz; editing by Alwyn Scott and G Crosse)
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