John Halpenny wrote:
"Jorge R. Frank" wrote:

wrote in
oups.com:

What is the purpose of reinventing an earth to LEO vehicle
besides
providing juicy low risk contracts for the US aerospace industry
when a
perfectly usable Soyuz is available off the shelf?

To reduce the technical and schedule risk for Spiral 2, by giving
US design
teams more experience. Spiral 1 is not intended to result in an
"operational" vehicle.

Yes there is a law that NASA has successfully used to support its
not
invented here strategy, but the cost and time of Spiral 1 is an
enormously high price to pay for reinventing yet another wheel.
Wheels
are useless in space.

The law will likely remain in place because US lawmakers see Iran
nonproliferation as being far more important than space
exploration.

If Lockheed gets the contract, they will buy Soyuz under a
"technology
transfer" agreement, jack up the price and sell it as american. They
will
launch it with their "american" Russian-engined Atlas booster.

John Halpenny

John, you and zzed60 are smoking crack. I can't think of a worse idea
to help space exploration then to use a program held hostage by a
Russian state-run agency. Yeah, that'll really help cost and
reliability. There's a reason Russian space vehicles are cheaper than
US, and it's not just the Russian cost of living. Soyuz is a very old
design with only two-system redundancy. That means a higher probability
of failure. Given, its longer flight history and better design margins
have given it better history than shuttle--but that's more of a comment
on how bad shuttle really is. An American designed and built capsule
will be more reliable, more expandable, and better suited to future use
beyond spiral 1, while Soyuz will be stuck in LEO forever.

There's no point in taking a shortcut to get to Spiral 1 if that then
makes further spirals untenable. That's cutting off the future for a
miniscule gain in the present.

Tom