"Jorge R. Frank" wrote:
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.

An excellent point that I had not considered. The Shuttle
may have evolved first as a standalone vehicle then toward
favoring station operations, but it still has a lot of
standalone capability, whereas the Soyuz TM variants have
evolved most of that capability into nonexistance. Mostly
because the Russians have not had a non-station-centric
manned spaceflight program for what? two decades? And
before that it was just a "put men in orbit to show that
we can" type thing a la Gemini or Mercury. And also because
they haven't upgraded the payload capabilities of their
launcher in, well, basically forever. They had planned to
swap it for the Ukranian Zenit, I think, but that kinda
fell through when the USSR split up *and* the Russian
economy went on the rocks. In short, the only way to get
more use out of the Soyuz spacecraft (which weighs about
twice as much as Gemini, FYI) with the very limited mass
budget was to trade off one thing for another. The obvious
tradeoff is the unused standalone flight capability.


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.

I've seen a similar phenomenon with the Shuttle ET
station fantasies. People confuse having a pressure
hull in orbit with a nearly complete spacestation.
Maybe on Earth, in, oh, the 1900s maybe, a mere
building was enough of a shelter to live in and call
close enough to a house, but in space a pressure
vessel isn't hardly the 10th part of a functioning
space station. Also, there are plenty of empty
stages in fairly accessable orbits, if it were such a
good idea why hasn't anyone used those yet?


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).

Up until very recently the Shuttle often didn't have
enough to do to pad out its flight rate. Which is why
they jumped at the chance to do Hubble servicing
missions for rock bottom "prices". And for a while the
servicing missions were just about the most important
thing the Shuttle *ever* did. But ISS came along and
gave the Shuttle plenty to do, though they still give
the same deals for the servicing missions out of
tradition, and because it's still a high prestige job,
and out of a lack of care for proper cost accounting
(it's not like the Shuttle needs to turn a profit).


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.

For this you'd have to buy a whole Soyuz, because you
need to use it and use it *up*. The seats weren't
buying Soyuzes, they were just buying rides on flights
which would fly regardless. It's like the difference
between buying a taxi ride and buying an autmobile.
Although in this case because the taxi rides are so
rare the ticket price was pretty steep, but I think
that gets across the general difference in usage.

And don't forget that #2, the launch of the instrument
carrier / rendezvous magical doohicky. At a minimum
that's going to be around a tenth of a gigabuck even
for a Delta II or Sea Launch launch, but more likely
it would need a Delta IV, Atlas V, or Arianne 5, due to
the mass.


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.

Quite.


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.

And I didn't even begin to think about the major
programatical difficulties something like this would
entail. It's like a mini version of Shuttle-Mir or
ISS. International agreements (and perhaps treaties)
would need to signed, and since the Baikonur launched
Soyuz can't reach Hubble that means that the US, the
ESA (a partner in Hubble), the Arianne countries, and
the Russians (and who knows who else) would have to
sit at a table and hammer out agreements and time
schedules and, erg, it makes my head hurt just
thinking about it. And consider the historical
difficulties with international government run ventures
of this sort, usually they go for some sort of
service or hardware swap, almost never do they actually
buy something directly from another country. Even in
the case of Zarya / FGB it was a subconctractor (Boeing)
which bought it from the Russians (and even that was
bad enough in the eyes of the government). I can only
imagine what would be involved with buying a Soyuz from
the Russians, launching it from Kourou, docking it with
this new thingamajig, doing who knows what else with it
that the Russians never thought of doing. And then,
what? where are they going to land? Hubble's orbit
doesn't pass over Russia or Kazakhstan, it just barely
passes over part of the lower US.

And then this automated docking module with cargo
capability thing comes in, gee, it's not like that
won't cost anything to build. Especially when it has
to rendezvous with something that was not designed for
automated rendezvous operations. The Europeans are
having a hard enough time building their ISS cargo
vehicle and it has a much, much easier task. And I
suppose Canada's going to sell someone a miniature
version of the SRMS at a deep discount, or something?

Scratch all of that out. Get back to the HST and the
science. Are any of the PIs going to be even remotely
interested in doing something so risky with *their*
instruments?


The more I think about it the crazier it sounds, and
it was already crazy to begin with, so that says a lot.