On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:02:29 GMT, in a place far, far away, Brian
Thorn made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:

On Tue, 16 Sep 2008 23:02:46 -0400, "Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)"
wrote:

Titanic had many ships within hours' travel of rescue The Californian
was within sight (her radioman had gone to sleep and distress rockets
were ignored by her captain, another change after Titanic was that all
large ships have their radios manned 24 hours a day) and the Carpathia
arrived on scene just after sunrise. ISS cannot expect to have other
ships available to rescue the crew within a reasonable amount of time.

Then either that has to change, or the assumption that it's a requirement
has to change.

It won't. Get over it. You may as well say that Carnival Cruises can
stop putting lifeboats on their ships. Never gonna happen.

Not a good analogy. Carnival Cruises isn't a cutting-edge operation
on a dangerous frontier.

Being able to "deliver all the way back to Southampton" is a lot
cheaper for NASA than having a Carpathia on standby for launch 24/7.

Or is it? Seriously. I do wonder if anyone has looked at the cost of
either developing a rescue craft for the next 4-5 years,

We don't need to develop a rescue craft. We just need to accellerate
Orion.

Or Dragon. Or put up a safe haven with an interorbital transfer
system, which is actually much simpler and cheaper.