New Russian Space Station 'Real Possibility'

su-geek writes: "BBC is reporting that the Russians are looking into the feasibility of a commercial space station. The Station would be used to promote space tourism and would help pay for future supply missions to the ISS." I think they should get into the business of crashing space stations into the Pacific, and bringing tourists on boats to watch the fireworks.

Comments

Like they have the money

[darthtuttle]

Hey barely have the money for what they are supposed to do for the ISS. I don't think the US would let them get away with it after all the financial problems they have caused us already. This is just politico's talking it up at best.

Re:Free Tacos? maybe next time.

[geomcbay]

But next time Taco Bell should use a 400x400 MILE target instead of 40x40 foot.

It would also be cool if the target were housing as many Chihuahuas as they could fit on it.

Russia Doesn't Need to Do This

[TOTKChief]

Seriously. Because of all the budgetary SNAFUs, Russia and other ISS partners are getting ceded a lot of crew time in order for some cash now to pay for Station components. The shell game is that we will then buy or rent the crew time back from the International Partners when the time comes to do real research on the station.

The rub is this, though: Russia [and other IP's] can gleefully tell us to go piss up a rope or pay the market rate for such services, because they can offer that crew time [as available, as trained, within reason, etc.] up to the highest commercial bidders. For example, I'm sure there's some rich fella who wouldn't mind being trained as an actual crewmember and really run things up there. He'd probably pay a pretty penny, and the IP's can flip NASA a big ol' bird until they ante up some coin.

I think the idea to be a bit insane from NASA's end--they knew this was going to be hugely expensive in the first place, and they haven't done a good job of selling Congress and the White House on increased funding. [Thanks, Clinton and Goldin, for those years of level funding, which now have NASA thinking about life support.]

Sure, NASA's done a lot of dumb things and could stand to out-source a bit of their work to return to the "promotion of useful arts and sciences", but ... -sigh-