"Neil Fraser" wrote in message
...
On Apr 16, 8:30 am, Pat Flannery wrote:
Orion can carry six astronauts, Soyuz only three.
So you need two Soyuz to evacuate the whole ISS crew, but only one
Orion.

Once Dragon (or one of its competitors) comes online, Russia would
presumably scale back its Soyuz flights so that there is only one
Soyuz docked to the station at any given time. Between one Dragon (7
crew) and one Soyuz (3 crew) I don't see a problem with evacuating the
six people on ISS.

Dragon will initially be unmanned. Who knows how long it will take SpaceX
to build a manned version which meets NASA's "man-rating" specifications.
Also, not all of Dragon's competitors are intended to (eventually) be
manned.

Mostly the scaled back Orion is there to keep NASA "in" manned spaceflght
until suitable enabling technologies are developed which would allow a
lunar, or Mars, program to go forward in an affordable way. Ares I and Ares
V simply weren't going to cut it from a cost point of view.

Jeff
--
"Take heart amid the deepening gloom
that your dog is finally getting enough cheese" - Deteriorata - National
Lampoon