David Spain wrote:

According to the link, NASA has inked a deal for six rides
on Soyuz to the ISS in 2012 and 2013 for $306 million.

That's still only around half as much as a single Shuttle mission.

I would suspect that if ISS were to be de-orbited in 2020 as what appears
to be the direction for the new plan, you'd be juuuuust beyond the
threshold where'd it'd pay to fund our own rocket program vs buying rides
on the Soyuz.

That would imply that we could come up with a rocket/capsule combo that
could launch astronauts at a price of under 51 million per head, which
is pretty doubtful, particularly given the far lower labor costs in
Russia and the fact that R&D costs for the US rocket and capsule would
have to amortized over the time scale between entry into service and the
end of the ISS in 2020 (although, just like Mir, I can see it getting
extended beyond that date if Russia figures out some way to make a
profit off of it, like they apparently do now due to NASA funding and
tourist flights).
Even with Ares-I/Orion getting replaced by a more economical
Falcon-9/Dragon combo, if you were just looking at things from a
economic point of view it would make more sense to just keep buying
further Soyuz flights from the Russians and scrap the whole US manned
program in any form.
No one seems to say what exactly we are supposed to do with
Falcon-9/Dragon once the ISS is retired, and considering that it
probably will take at least three years to get it up and flying in a
crewed operational form, it's not going to have that long of a service
life unless something post-ISS can be found for it to do.
Who could really clean everyone's clock in the price-per-person-into-LEO
business is China; and considering they already have their Shenzhou in
operation, I'm surprised they haven't contacted NASA and told them they
could beat the Russian price hands-down and be ready to go inside of a
year or two.


Then, when 2020 comes along, weeeelll the ISS gets another extension to
say 2028, where its juuust beyond the threshold to where buying rides on
Soyuz is still cheaper than building our own, then when 2028 get around,
weeeellll.....

I suspect the ISS will probably be operational till it starts to fall
apart, like Mir was. Hopefully they won't have some major incident that
kills all the crew before it's retired when something major fails, or
finally a small piece of space junk or meteor punches a hole in it.
It will probably be a long time before anything that big gets built in
space again, and the Russian plans for a follow-up space station look a
lot more like a scaled-down Mir than a ISS:
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/opsek.html

Pat