Pat Flannery wrote in
:

Herb Schaltegger wrote:

We'd also have our own equivalent of a CRV by now, too, quite possibly
giving a leg up on the current impetus to create CEV, rather than
having to do so from scratch.

That's true, but a situation with the Station built and the loss of
Columbia means that the crew has to evacuate via the CRV, and then you
have to hope you can keep the unmanned station operational while you
fix the Shuttle.

Freedom was designed to be a lot more autonomous than ISS turned out to be,
mainly because the assembly sequence called for it to be man-tended until
assembly complete. When the Russians joined ISS and permanent-manned
capability moved much earlier in the assembly sequence, a lot of that
autonomy was sacrificed since there was assumed to be a crew there.

--
JRF

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