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NASA has released a media advisory today indicating that there will be a major announcement today at 16:00 EDT (20:00 UTC) about commercial crew transportation to the International Space Station. The graphic in their announcement includes the apparently new buzzphrase: "Launch America". The announcement will be made from Kennedy Space Center.
Commence wild speculation over CST-100, Dragon, etc.
[Update] The announcement: American Companies Selected to Return Astronaut Launches to American Soil
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NASA to Announce Crew Transport Plan for ISS
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Max told his friend that he'd just as soon not go hiking in the hills.
Said he, "I'm an anti-climb Max."
[So is that punchline.]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 16 2014, @07:26PM
Boeing is going to beat out SpaceX for the contract. [washingtonpost.com]
I'm bummed.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 16 2014, @07:28PM
More here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2014/09/16/reports-boeing-to-beat-out-spacex-for-nasa-contract-thanks-to-jeff-bezos/ [forbes.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by physicsmajor on Tuesday September 16 2014, @08:24PM
Per the actual announcement on the NASA blog, they went with Boeing AND SpaceX.
http://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew/2014/09/16/bolden-competition-made-it-tough-choice-but-the-right-choice-boeing-and-spacex-to-build-new-spacecraft/ [nasa.gov]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday September 16 2014, @08:37PM
Lots of flag waving "AMERICAN" in that press release, LOL.
The SpaceX project is all american made, including some interesting KISS-style engines. The whole thing is KISS theme. Not talking about the band either. They've got flying hardware and need some certification and testing and off they go.
The Boeing CST-100 is a vaporware capsule (afaik) and its made to sit on top of numerous boosters, likely the first is the atlas5 with RUSSIAN RUSSIAN RUSSIAN engines. Just thought I'd bring that up. Comically (sorta) you could boost a CST-100 capsule on top of a falcon-9 although why you'd use the boeing product instead of the spacex dragon capsule is mysterious.
My guess is Boeing was going to get the whole thing in the usual back room deal corruption stuff despite being 100% composed of vapor, but they don't have a booster than doesn't use Russian engines, so they kinda had ta throw spacex a bone. Go ahead boeing, build your capsule for twice what the entire spacex project will cost, when russia cuts off our supply of RD180s for the Atlas booster, they can just put the gold plated CST100 on top of a falcon9 for launch...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gman003 on Tuesday September 16 2014, @10:09PM
I think the more likely answer is "Boeing has enough clout on the Hill that if we cut them out we're fucked bipartisanly, but SpaceX is so cheap we can go with both, then cut out Boeing once they miss a milestone and still come in on budget".