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Frontiers April 2014 Issue

team member Rachelle Ornan, regional director for Sales and Marketing, Boeing Commercial Airplanes. That started a One Boeing collaboration with Boeing Space Exploration engineers, who were already considering such an approach for the interior of the CST-100. Over the next several months the Seattle-based team built a foam mock-up and experimented with LED lights. The team eventually spent three days in Houston. Engineers with Boeing Space Exploration also visited Seattle to learn more about the Boeing Sky Interior. There were significant challenges in figuring out how to incorporate a concept for a commercial airplane cabin into the interior of a spacecraft. “Knowing that there’s a true up and down in an airplane, that’s helpful. But in a spacecraft, there’s no up and down. That was the first challenge,” Ornan explained. Added Castilleja: “Our Commercial Airplanes engineers got a taste for the restraints of a human-rated space vehicle.” But having elements of the Boeing Sky Interior in the spacecraft, Ornan said, will mean a much better passenger experience. “Throughout the spaceflight experience, passengers should have a sense of calm and feel relaxed just as they do on airplanes,” Ornan said. “On a spacecraft, including a familiar daytime blue sky scene seems natural to meet the passenger’s need to remain connected to Earth.” The design of past spacecraft such as Apollo and the space shuttles was driven by specific engineering requirements, Castilleja noted. “With the CST-100, this is the first time where we are exceeding those requirements and creating an actual customer experience.” Ferguson pointed out that even though Boeing is designing the CST-100 for its U.S. government customer, NASA, there may be other commercial opportunities. “We always have in the back of our mind those potential commercial customers,” he said. “We have to think about what that future customer might want built into the vehicle. So perhaps if we build it now, they will come.” And having elements of the Boeing Sky Interior in the CST-100 will make the spaceflight experience for those future commercial customers so much better, the former astronaut said. The Boeing Sky Interior, a customer option on Next-Generation 737s but the standard interior for the 737 MAX under development, draws on years of research by Boeing in cabin design and feedback from airplane passengers. Blue LED lighting above the overhead bins in the 787 cabin, as well as for the 737 Boeing Sky Interior, gives the ceiling an open-sky look, connecting passengers to the experience of flight. But the lighting also makes the cabin seem more spacious. “We highly integrated the lighting with the architecture to create a sense of sky above them,” explained Blake Emery, director of differentiation strategy for Boeing Commercial Airplanes. Emery led the research into the Sky interior for the Sonic Cruiser and 787 and subsequently the 737 Boeing Sky Interior. Now, he could not be more pleased that the Boeing Sky Interior will light the way for passengers and crew who fly into space in the CST-100. “Space travel is kind of like the way air travel was decades ago,” Emery said. “It is just at the beginning of being commercialized. We’re at a whole new frontier.” n kelly.g.kaplan@boeing.com ILLUSTRATION: Boeing’s CST-100 spacecraft will typically carry five people plus cargo to low Earth orbit destinations, including the International Space Station. BOEING Frontiers April 2014 27


Frontiers April 2014 Issue
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