I can't argue with you, you could easily be correct.

DWA

PS: I believe that this is the first time that the above words were ever
posted in sci.space.policy.


"hop" wrote in message
om...
"David Anderman" wrote in message
m...
Note that the mass for the reworked Soyuz heat shield is no more than
300
kg. Updated details about the Lunar Express SM system are available at:

www.constellationservices.com

but if you can read Russian, there is a very interesting story at:

http://www.kp.ru/daily/23335/31058/

BTW, I would be happy to answer questions about this near term lunar
mission, right here.

DWA
Nice to see you here. There was some discussion of the concept earlier
on this NG (see this long url for google archive

http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&...ff&threadm=64c
0d119.0408060844.261c9825%40posting.google.com&pre v=/groups%3Fdq%3D%26num%3D
25%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26group%3Dsci.space.station%26safe%3Doff%2
6start%3D25
)

My personal take is it is a very interesting, but it would be hard to
get anyone to pay for it. The US Govt. won't, because of the Iran
non-proliferation act, and the fact that 'buy cheap Russian hardware'
is not likely an acceptable component of the moon plan (for both good
and bad reasons). If transportation of humans and cargo to lunar orbit
were open for anyone to bid on, it could be a different story.

ESA might, conceivably, but it is hard to see how they would justify
it. ESA ISS flights are promoted as providing manned spaceflight
experience (since they fly as FEs) as well as micro-g science. Neither
of those would seem to gain additional benefit from going around the
moon. National prestige alone seems questionable, especially if they
are just paying for a ride that anyone with enough cash can take.

Tourists are possible, but the cost would seem put severe limits on
the market. At the current $10-20 million rumored price, the Russians
still have some trouble getting applicants who have funding and can
meet the medical and training requirements.

Even if the boost stage (+ECLS and hab area) could be made largely by
gluing together existing hardware, it is still a new manned
spacecraft. And even though the Soyuz upgrade should be reasonably
simple, it would require some development and re-qualification. Zond
was a long time ago, on a different LV, and a variant of Soyuz quite
different from the TMA. All this makes me think that the development
cost would be non-trivial.

In any case, I wish you the best of luck and would be glad to be
proven wrong.