Boeing- CST-100 & GEOINT

According to a September 15th press release, the agreement states that Boeing is continuing to advance its design for the CST-100 spacecraft under NASA's Commercial Crew Development Space Act Agreement. In mid-July, Boeing released several artist's renderings of it's CST(Crew Space Transportation)-100 spacecraft which will deliver it's passengers to both the ISS and the Bigelow Aerospace Orbital Space Complex (image below). The CST-100 is a bit larger than Apollo but smaller than Orion, with the ability to be able to launch on several different rockets including the Atlas, Delta and Falcon. The price hasn't quite been set for a seat on the CST-100 and the co-founder of Space Adventures, Eric Anderson, stated that the company isn't quite ready to talk about the price yet. They did however state that the pricing matrix would be competitive to the current Russian launches on the Soyuz spacecraft which is currently used by Space Adventures. To give you an idea, the Canadian billionaire, Guy Laliberte ponied up about $40 million for his last trip to the International Space Station. Find out a bit more about all of the extended training that he had to go through in order to qualify for his trip by clicking here. Mr. Laliberte had to undergo almost 200 days of intense training to prepare for this spaceflight to the Space Station -- Find out a bit more about the training by reading extracts from Guy's blog. If you navigate around the Space Adventures website, you can find lots of interesting videos, demonstrations and even video blogs and recordings from past passengers.

So, although the pricing will most likely be far to much for an average individual to reserve a seat, it's like anything else—pricing eventually goes down as more players enter into the game. Perhaps in a couple decades, pricing might be a bit more reasonable, and we'll all be headed into orbit.

The Company's newest technology 

The Boeing Company [NYSE: BA] will demo its geospatial data management technologies for the Intelligence Community, defense and national security customers at the GEOINT Symposium, October 16-19 in San Antonio, Texas. The Boeing exhibit will introduce the company’s newest “Human Geography” technology. 

“The Boeing Human Geography solution provides community data in categories such as political ideology, ethnicity, cultural habits, language, education and health care — and how these have contributed to the intelligence picture,” said Dewey Houck, Intelligence Systems Group vice president. “It offers historical trends and patterns to help give the analyst a holistic understanding of nations and regions by broadening and deepening their analytic expertise.” In addition to Human Geography, the Boeing exhibit at Booth 313 also will feature the following technologies: 

• TAC – An analytical tool that enables real-time collaborative analysis through the persistent querying of streaming and stored data, giving users immediate access to data relevant to their topic of interest
• 3-D Ladar – A mapping capability that uses laser light technology to produce a precise 3-D image of the terrain. The laser radar, or ladar, weighs less than 20 pounds (8 kg), enabling multi-platform use and supporting a variety of surveillance and sensing applications
• SAR Agility – The Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image analysis tool draws on the power of mass-market Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) to provide real-time processing and user interaction, resulting in fast and comprehensive extraction of actionable information from complex SAR imagery

Boeing also will showcase its comprehensive, web-based GEOINT source-discovery solution. This solution allows online, on-demand access to search across internal and external data sources, as well as different classification levels, using Boeing eXMeritus HardwareWall and a variety of industry standard protocols and messaging formats.