波音公司打造“太空的士”，你想去太空旅游么？
Boeing is planning to develop a so-called space taxi for NASA astronauts. It includes a seat for paying tourists to fly to the International Space Station. The $4.2 billion, five-year contract allows Boeing to sell rides to tourists.
Although the exact price has not been set, Boeing said that the price would be competitive with what the Russian space agency now charges to fly tourists to the orbital outpost（轨道前哨）- around $50m.
“Part of our proposal into NASA would be flying a Space Adventures spaceflight participant up to the ISS,” Boeing said. Space Adventures is scheduled（计划）in January to begin training British singer Sarah Brightman for a 10-day visit to the station, a trip costing $52 million. Brightman hopes 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.
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 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.
Separately, Boeing and Lockheed announced recently that United Launch Alliance（同盟）would invest heavily in a new rocket engine being developed by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and his private company space company Blue Origin. The agreement is aimed at freeing the
本时文内容由奇速英语国际教育研究院原创编写，禁止复制和任何商业用途，版权所有，侵权必究！