"JF Mezei" wrote in message ...
Watching the NASA press conference:
Rocket was at roughly 50km altitude.
Just after the boosters separated normally, the "situation" was found
and abort declared.
Took about 35 minutes for capsule to fall down, capsule would have spun
some and experienced up to 6g.
Question from media: Does NASA still pay for flight if the Russians
don't deliver astronauts? "I am not sure" was the answer :-) Apparently
the contracts as milestones, so I would venture that the time spent to
train the crews is still paid.
The Soyuz which was to be replaced has a "Best Before" date of Jan 4th,
and there were questions of decrewing the station.
Crew currently at 5. I recall, perhaps erroneously that post Columbia,
they shrunk it down to 2 to insufficient cargo capacity. In the current
station config, could 2 keep the station alive or would they need 3 ?
(cargo no lonegr an issue).
If I'm reading right, the actual crew right now is 3. 3 returned on the 4th
on MS-08.
This flight would have brought the crew up to 5.
So in January, wouldn't the crew drop to 3 with 2 returning? When is
the other soyuz's "Best before" date?
I believe right now the only Soyuz at the Station is Soyuz MS-08.
The NASA official: there is a hard requirement for crews to be on board
the ISS to accept the first commercial crew test flight. When pressed
on that issue, NASA guy seemed to want to leave the door open for a
review of this requirement if things come to that.
I was discussing options elsewhere and part of it depends on a few factors:
1) How long before the Russians fly again. If it's before January, no real
issues. And knowing the Russians, they'll fly before January, even if it's
an all Russian crew.
2) If they don't, in theory, SpX-DM1 is scheduled to fly in January. One
possibility is to fly this as is, but keep it on orbit and de-orbit the
Soyuz. I doubt NASA would want to trust this as a lifeboat/return craft, but
I think it's worth considering the risk.
3) Even if the Russians won't fly a crewed flight before January, they could
fly an uncrewed Soyuz, dock it and replace Soyuz MS-08.
4) I suspect we're going to see a bunch of paperwork suddenly flying that
will give an option of moving up the Dragon v2 flights.
I don't think CST-100 will change much because I don't think ULA has the
boosters available to make much of a difference.
This is a way SpaceX really shows what frequent, cheap launch can do. When
you've got a cadence of 15-20 flights a year, it's pretty easy to move stuff
around.
Right after booster separation, booster emergency light turned on, and
the ejection system fired automatically.
Search and rescue were already on the ground at the time the capsule
reached the ground.
--
Greg D. Moore
http://greenmountainsoftware.wordpress.com/
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