Let's Steal the Soyuz

June 11, 2008

Well not “steal” it exactly, just do what Japan has done to our automobile industry, China to textiles and India to tech support. Import it, then re-label ‘Made in America.’ It’d be a neat way around the prohibition against buying Soyuz from the Russians, who are being punished -- not really -- for providing technology and dangerous ideas widely available on the internet to Iran, which is next door to Iraq and probably what the Bush Administration was really aiming for when they got us embroiled in the bruhaha over there.

And the U.S. really needs a spaceship because we can’t afford to fly the shuttles and simultaneously develop safer ships that can transport people to the space station as well as beyond low-Earth orbit, which we’ve been going ‘round and ‘round in since 1972, the last moon landing.

Unfortunately it took a national tragedy to buck up to the fact that the shuttles are too expensive and risky to fly forever, wonderful machines that they are. Problem is, it’s going to take five or six years to get the new crafts flying after the shuttles are retired. NASA has taken to calling this period “the gap.”

Leaving aside the fact that right now NASA is banned from purchasing Soyuz after its current exemption expires in 2011, the United State’s plan for staffing the space station during the gap is to get another exemption to buy more Soyuz. We’ll need twice as many as before, in fact because next year the size of the space station’s crew doubles to six. The Soyuz can hold three people.

Now comes the news today that Google co-founder Sergey Brin has plunked down $5 million for his own Soyuz so that he and another tourist can go visit space. (Apparently the Congressional ban doesn’t apply to private companies.) The firm arranging the jaunt will even hire a full-fledged Russian cosmonaut to pilot the rocketeers.

Which brings me to this: Why not import the Soyuz or get a license to manufacture them here? Florida, which just lost out to Virginia to be the launch site for a proposed commercially developed station cargo hauler, would be game. Might even get our Congressional delegation focused on an issue they need to be concerned with, like trade, economics and foreign affairs, rather than deciding if an Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer dark matter device should fly on the shuttle or not.

Just a thought ….

Comments

[Dave Mosher]

The funniest part about this is that it'd actually make sense, logistically and financially. But we all know NASA will never do this... let's see if they can prove a pessimist wrong.

[Anonymous]

Actually it doesn't make sense.

Why should the US buy/steal Russian capsule designs and manufacturing processes, when at least one US company (SpaceX) is already developing a commercial capsule? SpaceX claims that their capsule (Dragon) will cost less per seat than Soyuz (a claim they'll have to achieve if they want tourist and other commercial business) _and_ their capsule will be able to fit seven people instead of Soyuz's three. They claim they're going to build it with or without government funding. If NASA funds commercial human capsule development under COTS D, we'll see Dragon faster and perhaps also see one or two other capsules materialize.

Why buy a Russian design when potentially very good capsules are being home-grown? Hopefully _better_ capsules, in fact---ones designed from the start around commercial motivations. Just bite the bullet and buy Soyuz seats from the Russians for a few years while nurturing our commercial capabilities.

[Matthias]

>Why buy a Russian design when potentially very good capsules are being home-grown?

Why bet (exclusively) on a POTENTIALLY very good capsule when there is a tested and reliable system available - and especially when you're bound to buying seats on exactly that design in the meantime?

I wonder how many manflight equivalents the licence, building and launching would cost… well, maybe Russia's just plain cheaper after all.

Oh, and yes, I think the Soyuz is very reliable, especially after the ballistic entry incident lately. It's basically designed so you could just drop it with all systems dead and it would still come down more or less intact - including the passengers. This is indeed amazing craftsmanship!

[Doug Booker]

I kind of think it is ashame that the shuttle is being abandoned. I do realize that there is no abort possibility and there are high risks. But as is typical of most engineering problems these risks have been mitigated to a large degree lately with the latest redesigns.

As far as the cost of the shuttle, perhaps Irene can give us an idea of what the current per mission cost is. Last I heard it was 400-500 million per flight. What I would like to remind everyone when they say it costs too much is that it with each launch it has the same amount of astronauts as 3 Soyuz (ok, you would get 2 more with the Soyuz PLUS about 3 Progress worth of cargo. Given that each Soyuz is about 85 million and assuming that the Progress is roughly the same, the 6 flights costs about 510 million.

I know, but what about emergency evacuation. We had the X38 almost done for use as a lifeboat.

[birdwatch]

The thing with the shuttle is that it needs a standing army of something like 20,000 or 25,000 engineers and technicians to support it whether it flies once a year or 10 times or not at all. I had an interesting interview with Mike Griffin as part of Discovery's When We Left Earth series (http://blogs.discovery.com/nasa_at_50/2008/06/how-nasa-lost-i.html) in which he explains that even if the shuttle were a perfect machine, it still is time to retire it because the U.S. space program needs to move on to a new frontier. As far as getting to and from low-Earth orbit, I personally think all options should be on the table, including China's spaceship.
Irene

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