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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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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.
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.
Agreed. Wouldn't it be much better & cheaper to create a global space agency. Use the best technology from all the member countries.
We are one people and its about time we started acting like it.
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No, there's a fee per checked bag. Only carry-on satellites that can fit underneath the seat in front of you are allowed for safety reasons.
please excuse my apathy
In what way do secret spy satellites contribute to national security?
If I told you that I'd have to shoot you.
...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
The thing to bear in mind with this sort of calculation is the fact that when you pay overseas for such a thing then that's money straight out your economy, whilst if you in house then even if it costs a little more much of that will come back as income and corporate tax, as well as maintaining highly skilled engineers and perhaps in some sections of such a programme even fostering an export market for certain items which in itself leads to greater tax income.
It's a similar point with military contracts- many in the UK criticise the expense of the Eurofighter programme for example, but ultimately when you factor in tax returns from workers, and factor in the export market it's not a terribly unreasonably priced project overall with added benefits of maintaining skillsets and avoiding independence on too many outside factors. Certainly we'd be far worse off economically and politically here in the UK had we chosen to simply buy in say the French Rafale, or a US or Russian alternative even if the initial price per plane was lower.
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)