- from a NASA perspective, CCP is not necessarily beneficial from a crude comparison of prices compared to buying from the Russians - from a US macroeconomics perspective, the expenditure for CCP is much more likely to benefit the economy as a whole, whereas it is difficult to argue that money spent in "modern" Russia can somehow benefit American interests.CCP only makes economic sense from the the nation's viewpoint. It also makes indirect economic sense for NASA by ensuring a second or third crew transport provider, thus greatly reducing the risk of a costly de-crew scenario.
If we attribute value to scientific research done at the ISS and increased value to more research, then the US crew vehicles are adding a lot value. IMO it has been consistently not been part of the calculation that they will allow one more crew member on the ISS and doubling the scientific work time. Presently two astronauts do maintenance, one does science. Increase by one astronaut will still have two doing maintenance but two doing science.
...in the context of ISS, $/seat for crew transportation is pretty much in the noise when compared to $/hr of usable crew time.
Then we just threw away a $100 billion space station.
we’re flying Boeing’s CST-100, it's called the Starliner, we’re going to put six astronauts on top of an Atlas rocket, so 2017, we’ll fly it unmanned, in 2018, we’ll fly it as a manned flight.
We’re working on getting it certified, and so right now, with Boeing, per the contract, we’re going through the human spaceflight organisation and looking at all the single point failures, all the redundancy, how things work, modifying the launch rockets primarily to meet their needs. It’s also interesting because the Boeing design doesn’t have an escape tower, it basically has four thrusters on the bottom of their capsule or the service module that will eject them off if there’s a bad day. And so there’s different things that the backpressure will tear apart, the backpressure of those thrusters if you have the wrong structural load will cause it to impinge on the capsule at very high altitudes, damages the heat shield, that will cause it to have a problem on reentry,
Look, an achilles heel of the Atlas system right now is the Centaur upper stage.
Russia has no intention of concluding more contracts for delivering US astronauts to the International Space Station after 2018, the deputy chief of the state-run corporation Roscosmos, Sergey Saveliev, has told the media.
The real concern here is not the tanker, but the reliability of Boeing management.And this, unfortunately, will be relevant to Commercial Crew.
We know Mcgregor has the shell version of the Dragon 2 for testing
We hear rumblings of FH hardware being produced also. Do we have any actual pictures of flight hardware being produced for the D2 and FH?
I was looking back today at the shuttle's launch history and saw that at its peak shuttle flew 9 flights in a year. The more steady cadence was 6 or 7 flights a year.This got me thinking to the commercial crew vehicles. Once both the Starliner and Crew Dragon are certified how often do you think they will fly a year? Do you think the ISS could support upwards of 9 U.S. manned flights a year?
Plan and budget is two flights/year with a rotation of 4 crew/flight (one crew of 4 rotation every 6 months). More than that would require additional budget and additional ISS support; unlikely for the foreseeable future.