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For Want Of A Soyuz

Posted by timothy on from the encapsulation dept.

sckienle writes "MSNBC has an article starting "Missions to the international space station may have to be suspended because Russia cannot afford to build new craft to carry crews there...." This is a problem because a Soyuz capsule must be attached to the ISS for emergency evacuation. The problem is further complicated because any one Soyuz capsule can only be docked to the ISS for 6 months maximum. Nor are they and their boosters built for reuse. The CNN version of the information is here. I guess we need to find more billionaires to take the space vacation. How about it Mr. Gates?"

2 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How about it Mr. Gates? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Thanks, I was hoping to beat the trolls...

    Don't exclude AC's from your modding... sometimes they have some of the most intellegent, even if contraversial, comments.

  2. Cost of upgrading. by Christopher+Thomas · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Come to think of it, wouldn't it be nice if a long lived program like a shuttle was designed with the idea that you would upgrade and improve systems continuously over the live of the program. With the shuttles, I know the later ones had improvments, and probably some of those improvements got added to older birds (when it is possible), but if it was designed to be upgraded through its life as needed it would be easy. Doesn't it cost more to maintain the old systems?

    That depends, as any modified man-rated space system has to go through an ungodly amount of engineering, testing, revision, and more testing before being certified - especially if it's a reusable system instead of a one-shot. You also have to modify and re-certify any of the support facilities that are affected by the change (and many will be - remember, they effectively take the shuttles apart and put them back together again between flights, and that takes equipment).

    Upgrading the design every decade I could see. Every couple of years would probably cost much more than it's worth.

    Re. economic benefits, bear in mind that Apollo cost a _huge_ amount of money. Yes, there were spinoffs, but was the program cost-effective compared to, say, offering a similar volume of tax incentives for research? This is basically the whole "military spending boosts the economy" debate. Except in very special cases, it's still open to debate whether the benefits are really there.

    Of course, a continuously-upgraded space fleet would be cool. I'm just not sure you can make a good case for it being an economic benefit.