"Christopher M. Jones" wrote in
:

"Al Jackson" wrote:
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/hubble-03a.html

What cha think?

Pure and utter fantasy. Firstly, there is no way for
the Soyuz to capture Hubble (it has no arm), no way to
berth Hubble, and thus no way to reboost Hubble (which
is the bare minimum for extending Hubble's life, even
without adding any instruments). Secondly, Soyuz does
not have near the proper storage areas for transporting
new instruments, let alone for holding them in place
while an EVA is performed to swap out old for new.
Both the axial and radial instruments are too large to
fit inside the Soyuz, let alone fit through the orbital
module hatch. Building a sub-spacecraft capable of
doing all that would be remarkably costly.

Not to mention that the modern Soyuz TM and TMA are highly evolved station
ferry vehicles, with very limited (4.2 day) standalone flight duration. The
days of extended standalone Soyuz missions are long gone, preceding even
the Soyuz T. The TM and TMA would be hard-pressed to support even one
Hubble-style EVA, and most shuttle missions to Hubble have 4 or 5 EVAs. The
original author's proposal to split one shuttle flight among two Soyuzes is
mental masturbation, nothing more. Making Soyuz a standalone vehicle
capable of supporting multiple EVAs will require modifications, and will
not be free.

And a manned Soyuz launch from Kourou is just about as
equally fantastical.

Right. A lot of people confuse the Soyuz U/FG *launchers* with the Soyuz
TM/TMA *spacecraft*. They're *not* synonymous, and the current Soyuz plans
at Kourou do *not* accommodate the spacecraft.

Most importantly though, the flights for Hubble
servicing missions always came free, so the missions
were pretty cheap (mostly just instrument costs and
incremental launch / training costs).

To elaborate a bit, it matters not that Soyuz costs are cheaper than
shuttle costs. The shuttle exists and is in operation, so adding a shuttle
mission to Hubble requires the government to pay the "marginal cost" - the
costs you mention, plus one external tank, plus one pair of rebuilt SRBs.
That comes to about $100 million, plus the instrument costs (which would be
incurred with the Soyuz as well).

Soyuz, on the other hand, would have to be purchased commercially. So the
figures of merit here are Soyuz "retail price" versus Shuttle "marginal
cost". And the retail price of a Soyuz mission to HST will undoubtedly be
far more than the $20 million Russia charges for a single seat on a three-
seat Soyuz that is headed for ISS anyway. Back when NASA was considering
buying Progress flights to ISS (prior to the Iran Nonproliferation Act of
2000), RSC Energia quoted a price of $130 million per flight, which was
reduced to $65 million by the intervention of RSA chief Yuri Koptev. A
Soyuz flight would undoubtedly cost more.

3) the
cost of transporting a Soyuz-TM from Russia to Kourou
and (more importantly) all the testing that needs to
be done in Kourou to make sure the vehicle is
operational, 4) the cost of upgrading Kourou's launch
facilities to be able to handle a manned Soyuz
launch...

Which, at a minimum, would involve pad modifications to allow crew
ingress/egress while the vehicle is vertical, which IIRC is not part of the
current plan.

and finally 5) the actual cost of such a
launch. At a bare minimum I'd think this would at
least triple the cost of a servicing mission, which
would probably be larger than the cost of launching a
whole new observatory of a new design.

Agreed.
--
JRF

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