words from the chairman of boeing on ssto type stuff yesterday i went to the boeing shareholders meeting it was a bit shorter than i expected last year when the stock was first down they made a big presentation on the and other programs this year it was much more bare bones in any case i wanted to ask a question that the board of directors would hear and so i got there early and figured that if i didn t get to the mike maybe they would read mine off of a card and so i wrote it down and handed it in after the meeting started mr shrontz said that he would only answer written questions in order to be fair to the people in the overflow room that only had monitors downstairs naturally i was crushed so when question and answer time came i was suprised to find my question being read and answered admittedly near the end of the ones that he took presumably getting there early and getting the question in early made all the difference so on to the substance the question was is boeing looking at anything beyond the high speed civil transport such as a commercial space launch system and if not how will boeing compete with the reusable single stage to orbit technology presently being developed by mcdonnell douglass well he read it without a hitch and without editing with impressed me then he answered it very quickly treating it as a two part question last part first this is to the best of my recollection what he said as far as single stage to orbit technology we think that we have a better answer in a two stage approach and we are talking to some of our customers about that as far as commercialization that is a long ways off the high speed civil transport is about as far out as our commercial planning goes at this point so this tells me that boeing still considers space to be a non commercial arena and for the most part this is true however it also tells me that they consider there to be enough money in building space launchers for them to persue work on their own now i do have a friend on the spacelifter program at boeing actually this is a mis nomer as there is no spacelifter contract for the work that this guy is doing however he is doing work in preparation of a proposal for space lifter contracts he won t tell me what he is doing but maybe this is where the tsto action is taking place at boeing at the very minimum the chairman of the board of boeing said that they have an approach in mind and they are trying to do something with it anybody know anything further is this really news does this threaten further work on dc john
