Space station future adrift (Soyuz purchase crisis)

Henry Spencer wrote:
I have some small hope that this particular problem might be dealt with
more expeditiously -- there are some vaguely promising signs -- but I
don't know that I'd bet money on it yet.


As I recall, when the US president retasked NASA to go to Moon/Mars and dump
Shuttle by 2010, if I remember cortrectly, only "CEV" was mentioned.

So, NASA is now tasked to build a "CEV" thing that will act as an escape pod,
Crew launcher to station, Crew vehicle to Moon, Crew vehicle to Mars etc etc
etc. One vehicle to fit all needs.

NASA built Apollo for a single very precise mission: get a few humans to moon
and back.

Unless NASA gets a specific mandate to build a simple escape pod for station,
it will never get built, and NASA will then try to build some do-everything
vehicle (currently called CEV) that can also be used as an escape pod. In
essence, another shuttle, but one which can stay 6 months in space something
which the shuttle can't do.

A "do everything "vehicle" will cost a whole lot of money, take longer to get
done and has far greater risk of being cancelled because of cost overruns.


NASA needs a totally separate project to build simple and cheap escape pods
for the station.

It can then focus on building the two vehicles that will replace the shuttle
(man + cargo). (Or better yet, just build more shuttles with all the
improvements NASA had been asking for in the last decade).

"John Doe" wrote in message ...
NASA built Apollo for a single very precise mission: get a few humans to
moon
and back.

This is not right. NASA was working on Apollo as a general purpose
spacecraft before they got the "to the moon" mandate from Kennedy.

Apollo was a very good general purpose capsule, as evidenced by its use for
lunar missions, Skylab missions, and ASTP. Other uses were planned as part
of the Apollo Applications Project, but those were all cancelled when it was
decided that the shuttle would replace Apollo/Saturn. Skylab and ASTP were
the two remaining bits from the AAP program.

Jeff
--
Remove icky phrase from email address to get a valid address.

On Tue, 07 Dec 2004 01:07:03 -0500, in a place far, far away, John Doe
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a way as
to indicate that:

Henry Spencer wrote:
I have some small hope that this particular problem might be dealt with
more expeditiously -- there are some vaguely promising signs -- but I
don't know that I'd bet money on it yet.


As I recall, when the US president retasked NASA to go to Moon/Mars and dump
Shuttle by 2010, if I remember cortrectly, only "CEV" was mentioned.

So, NASA is now tasked to build a "CEV" thing that will act as an escape pod,
Crew launcher to station,

Those are not CEV requirements.