Space Florida is an agency backed by the State of Florida established to advance space related business in the State, now that the retirement of the space shuttle fleet has left many major facilities unused. Boeing Co. has announced that they have reached an agreement with Space Florida to lease the old Orbiter Processing Hangar Bay 3 at the Kennedy Space Centre in Central Florida. The purpose? To build 7-seat space taxis, no less.
NASA is currently sponsoring four companies to build space vehicles that can be used to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). The name space-taxi is an apt designation as the vehicles will in all likelihood be operated by commercial companies with the service being used by NASA and other customers on a rent-a-ride basis.
This is of course completely in line with the plans of the Kennedy Space Centre which wants to develop a state of the art spaceport that will be able to support NASA missions as well as serve the needs of commercial customers in the US and abroad.
Just an interesting aside… there was a time when the space shuttle was seen as the pinnacle of space travel technology and now, only a few decades later, state of the art means something totally different. Something that is not even in the same direction of development. Of course a lot have been learned from the shuttle development and many materials that are commonplace now in our homes were first used on the shuttle… But still, as a vehicle concept, it has proven a dead end.
Boeing’s taxis, called the CST (Crew Space Transportation)-100, is a 7 seat capsule that will be carried into space on an Atlas 5 rocket. Have we not seen something like that before?
In any case, you will have to wait until 2016 before you can whistle up a space-taxi.