Tourist flights

In article ,
says...

I wanted to follow up with this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CST-100_Starliner I was reading this earlier
tonight and came across

"As of 2014, the CST-100 was to include one space tourist seat, and the
Boeing contract with NASA allows Boeing to price and sell passage to
low-Earth orbit on that seat."

and

"Part of the agreement with NASA allows Boeing to sell seats for space
tourists. Boeing proposed including one seat per flight for a space flight
participant at a price that would be competitive with what Roscosmos charges
tourists.[32]"

This leads to:
https://www.reuters.com/article/boei...0RI2XY20140917



Makes sense, and I'm all for it. If NASA doesn't need the seat, why not
let the commercial crew provider sell the seat to someone else? In the
long run, it helps keep the commercial crew provider profitable and
successful (hey, it's the capitalist way). Presumably another country
could buy the seat for their own "astronaut", making it appear much less
like a "tourist" flight.

And before anyone gets sanctimonious about such "important" spots being
wasted on tourists, NASA used to give away "payload specialist" seats on
the space shuttle all the damn time. They often went to government
contractors, foreign dignitaries, US politicians, and even one
overweight and aging Russian cosmonaut that surely raised the eyebrows
of the NASA medical teams.

Free US Government give-aways were more egregious than paid tourists,
IMHO.

Jeff
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