US astronauts haven’t had their own ride into orbit since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. Two private companies are racing to replace it and become the first to fly astronauts for NASA.
Boeing and SpaceX are being paid billions of dollars to build and operate crewed space capsules that will take humans to the International Space Station. NASA and the two companies recently shared new pictures of the astronauts and their custom spacesuits training for their flights with simulated missions in dummy capsules.
Here’s the inside of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner:
Here’s SpaceX’s Dragon crew capsule:
Both are about six times smaller than the Space Shuttle main cabin: The Dragon has an interior volume of about 10 cubic meters and the Starliner about eleven cubic meters.
The new class of astronauts can at least take comfort in the fact that their capsules are about sixty percent larger than the Apollo command module that took astronauts on multi-day journeys to the moon—and NASA is requiring that private engineers attempt to make the capsules more than twice as safe as the space shuttle was when it stopped flying.
While superficially similar, the two vehicles have their own identities; SpaceX’s controls are almost entirely based on touchscreens, while Boeing maintains more physical switches, for example. Both are now approaching maturity, with uncrewed test flights expected in 2018.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk shared this picture yesterday of the Dragon and its “trunk,” a container for additional unpressurized cargo and support systems, undergoing electromagnetic interference tests before a journey to a massive NASA vacuum test chamber in Ohio.
And here’s an exterior view of two Boeing Starliners under construction in November 2017:
