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NASA Buys 12 Seats On Soyuz
jamax noted that NASA has announced the purchase of 12 seats on Soyuz for 2014 to 2016. The price tag was $753 million — just a stitch over $62M per chair to the ISS.
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Seriously, isn't this cheaper than we can do ourselves? Granted, we need our own program for national security and all that, but this still sounds cheaper than what we have been doing, with the Shuttle program.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Around 1971, could anyone have imagined this is where we would be in 2011? Having no ships of our own and hitching rides from the Ruskies' spacecraft originally designed in the 1960s?
Take off every sig. For great justice.
I actually think this sort of cooperation is a good thing. The space race and Cold War have been over for a long time. It's about time we started acting like it.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
More disconcerting is the fact that ANY serious dispute with Russia will need to be taken into account as they could refuse to launch to the ISS (or let our astronauts down) in a diplomatic crisis.
Depending on another country that you are not the best friends with to provide you with the ONLY transportation to your space station does not sound like a good idea.
if nasa funded manned falcon 9s, they are what, 50 million a flight, and 7 seats? so, thats a saving of at least half a billion dollars, using an american launch system to boot.
NASA needs to get their shit together, and develop their own damned spacecraft so we don't have to borrow Russia's ships. If Congress can bail out the evil, lying, fraudsters called BANKS, they can fund science and technology research.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
What exactly is so shameful about international cooperation in regard to the *international* space station? The Cold War has been over for a long time now, you know. And I'm more than a little sick of the residual pride of some of my fellow Americans. To be honest, it was bad enough to put up with all the cocky nationalism DURING the Cold War, much less 20 years later.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Getting taken to the cleaners by the criminal gangsters and thugs otherwise known as the Russian government, is bad enough without worrying about what will happen if some kind of diplomatic crisis happens, and the Russian government starts using the prospect of the ISS crashing in the South Pacific as leverage in their rather cynical and thuggish foreign policy.
...no commercial value, minimal scientific value .... basically worthless for long term space exploration
There were plans to do all of that. Cut to save money of course.
now build a tanking platform with robotic spacecraft construction/assembly/food production/power generation/roid mining gear at lagrange points l1/l2 for staging earth/moon/mars/europa missions
Hmm. Lets see how that would play out. Well, we had to bail out a banker whom was a major campaign donor, so there goes the cash for the storage tanks. Add an expensive unwinnable permanent land war in Asia, so we had to cut the robot arm and food production bay to buy ammo. Social security is running out of cash so we'll cut the asteroid mining mission too.
Leaving us, yet again, with:
... they can sit there and stare out at the earth from the ... portholes for six months at a shot ...
Mix and repeat...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Put US Flag stickers all over the exterior of the craft like the advertising on NASCAR vehicles. Our fragile ego is saved, problem solved.
With less than 1/2 of one percent of the annual federal budget, this isn't going to happen any time soon. Maybe if we can stand down the war machine for a while....
Anyway, Constellation was looking like a viable option. Unfortunately, it was way over budget. With the scrapping of Constellation, I think we're going to see some commercial partnerships forming where the launch vehicles will be owned and possibly operated by the contractor.
NASA needs to get their shit together, and develop their own damned spacecraft so we don't have to borrow Russia's ships.
You try getting your shit together when your mission, mandate, creed, materials list, allowed technology, and half of your design are handed down to you from on high by a bunch of technologically clueless dipshits that spent their high school years playing the popularity game rather than learning calculus.
You want NASA to build it's own damned spacecraft that isn't a bloated, over budget, expensive piece of shit? Get their funding out of the hands of the petty, squabbling, corrupt retards that are on the Congressional science and budget committees. Until they are given a wad of cash that doesn't have 100 riders and 30 pieces of pork attached to it, the folks at NASA won't be able to design a damned thing worth designing.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Unfortunately this story is now down the page, so this probably won't be read much, but I'm going to correct the false assumption here that seems to have played a major part in this thread.
NASA does not launch military spacecraft. That job, today, falls to the United Launch Alliance (primarily, smaller payloads can go on other US commercial providers), a wholly separate organization from NASA. (ULA does occasionally launch NASA spacecraft, but at that point, NASA is simply a customer who is buying a ride to orbit.) The last time NASA itself launched a military payload was STS-53 in 1992. Since then, all payloads have gone up on unmanned Air-force or commercial launch vehicles. (Why is this? Challenger. The military did not want to be grounded for another two years if another shuttle had an accident.)
So no, we do not need NASA for national security, and have not since 1992.
Back to the point of the main article, I find it interesting that congress appears to be perfectly happy to send hundreds of millions of dollars to Russia for rides to orbit, but have to be dragged kicking a screaming to let NASA pay some American companies to develop the same capability, possibly for even cheaper (i.e. SpaceX's goal of 20-30 million per seat to the ISS)