Mike Combs wrote:
wrote in message
ups.com...
On Jun 11, 9:53?pm, "Jorge R. Frank" wrote:
Rand Simberg wrote:
Charles Talleyrand:
Can the shuttle fly with no one on board? Takeoff, dock, land, the
whole shebang?
No, but the ability to allow it to do so is trivial,
Perhaps for launch and landing. Not so for docking. That would be a
distinctly non-trivial upgrade.
soyuz could ferry trained pilots to handle final docking

Maybe Progress could be up-rated to take up a single pilot. It could
automatically dock with Station, then the pilot could hop over to the
unmanned Shuttle to dock it since automated docking is too complicated.

Hmmm.....

Hmmm... Progress has no heat shield. So what happens to the pilot in the
event of a launch abort? Or a failure to dock? If you're suggesting
up-rating the Progress to include a heat shield, don't bother. That
already exists. It's called Soyuz, silly.

And if the Progress docks to the station, just how does the pilot "hop
over" to the unmanned shuttle, since it hasn't docked yet? If your
intention was for him to hop back into the Progress, undock from the
station, then rendezvous and dock with the shuttle, then why would you
bother docking to the station first? That just wastes propellant and time.

Besides, you would have to equip the Progress/Soyuz with an APAS in
order to dock it with the shuttle. The Russian docking ports on ISS
aren't APAS. And the APAS ports on ISS don't support Kurs. So a
Soyuz/Progress modified to dock with a shuttle cannot dock with ISS. It
would have to be a "throwaway", and therefore would carry a higher price
than a Soyuz/Progress that was going to go to ISS anyway.

I know bbo hallreb isn't capable of thinking things through before he
posts, but I didn't think you'd fall into the same trap.