Greg Autry is sort of singing my tune:
If NASA were compelled to “downselect” Commercial Crew to a single vendor, Washington power politics would clearly favor Boeing’s CST-100 capsule, a luxurious spacecraft, that while it has never flown, is on track for some unmanned flights to the ISS in about three years. This leisurely development schedule puts no pressure on SLS. While it is surely coincidently that both the SLS and CST-100 programs are headquartered in Houston, we are lucky to have Messrs. La Branche and Culberson standing between us and the utter chaos of free market competition.
…Frankly, DragonRider could fly to the ISS next month if it were subject to the same expectations of safety as NASA’s Space Shuttle. A truly conservative response to Mr. Rogozin would be to announce that the United States is ready to move a DragonRider launch forward without further testing, send eight Navy Seals to the ISS and “liberate” our space station from Russia’s state capitalist squatters.
Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far. But that’s Greg.
Well, it’s good to know that you’re not as retarded as Mr. Autry.
Doesn’t matter how well armed those Seals are, any spacecraft docking to ISS requires active cooperation of both segments. Passive non-cooperation would be sufficient to prevent any spacecraft from docking. Passive-aggressive non-cooperation would be more than so.
Picky picky.
How soon they forget the tried and true. Siege warfare. The marines only have to blockade the I.S.S. until they are ready to welcome them to surrender with open arms.
…and if the Station power and coolant systems happened to “accidentally” come unplugged, the siege might not last that long.
Have we just heard from a commander in the space marines? 😉
“It became necessary to destroy the station to save it.”
SEALS?
Gotta be Marines. So they can be the first Space Marines! Shoot, worth doing even if we were getting along great with the Ruskis, just to set the precedent.
A few hundred thousand volunteers, easy.
Y’know, I was actually thinking the other day it would make a rousing good story. Russians take over ISS, military has to train special ops guys in a Bigelow module for zero-g tactics. No bullets allowed, so only tasers and such. Can’t dock without help, so a breaching pod is designed that attaches with adhesive to a docking port and the hatch is cut open… If only I could write. It would sort of be an updated “Storming Intrepid.”
Actually peer agreement with NASA the Russians are allowed to have firearms on the ISS because of the Russian policy of giving their cosmonauts firearms, due to the possibility, by landing on land, they could inadvertently wind up in dangerous territory.
Bob Clark
The Russians has permission to have firearms. Discharging one aboard the station might be generally taken as an invitation to be shoved out the nearest airlock without a spacesuit.
This opposition in Congress to fully funding the commercial crew program is simply bizarre. There is no logical overlap between what the SLS is supposed to do and what the commercial crew program is for, yet the powerful SLS supporters in Congress consistently insure the commercial crew program is not fully funded.
This holds true even for a potentially bizarre scenario of SpaceX flying their own astronauts to space in 2015 yet NASA being forced to continue paying Russia to send NASA astronauts to the ISS until 2017. All the while Rogozin and Putin laugh at us at being dependent on them to carry our astronauts to the ISS.
Bob Clark
SLS is a multi-billion dollar boondoggle. Politicians love boondoggles because of the campaign contributions, kickbacks and enriched cronies. Should the Falcon Heavy prove successful, all sorts of embarrassing questions will be raised about the SLS with the best explaination being “Shut UP!” Likewise, a successful commercial manned spaceflight capability will open up questions of why we’re paying a billion dollars a year to develop Orion when all 2 1/2 commercial projects are costing less than a billion dollars, total.
Pithily put, Messrs. Clark and Larry J. But SLS may be in real trouble if ATK, now part of Orbital, defects from the SLS coalition in favor of building new first-stage solid motors for Antares. No 5-egment solids, no SLS. Also, no more SLS help from the Utah delegation. As for Texas, the delegation there seems to be coming around to seeing SpaceX as both a company with a growing Texas footprint and vanishingly little likelihood of just going away. In another year, maybe less, the SLS caucus will be down to a few Alabamians. They won’t be enough to save the thing.
“This opposition in Congress to fully funding the commercial crew program is simply bizarre.”
I don’t think we know what fully funding actually means. It certainly isn’t the number Obama asked for in his budget or what congress ended up approving.
Orbital ATK would be insane to replace the liquid Antares first stage with a huge solid, at least if they plan to continue to launch from Wallops. Their launch schedule is under continual threat due to possible weather conditions that could result in window breakage in nearby public and private buildings. And ALL of that is due to their relatively small (30,000 pound) solid second stage. Launching something the size of SRB from Wallops would be so sporty, they could never actually schedule it.
A solid-fueled replacement first stage for Antares won’t be anywhere near as massive as an SRB. How much noise it will make relative to the current paired KX-33’s I have no way to estimate. If the Antares has a window breakage problem, though, it has to be entirely due to the noise of the current liquid-fueled first stage, which has a rather leisurely climb-out from the Wallops pad. It sure ain’t the second stage. The vehicle is 70 miles up and that far or farther downrange when the second stage lights off. Except in the case of a night launch, I doubt this event can be seen from Wallops let alone heard.
Ooops! That should be “paired NK-33’s” above. Brain fart.
The window breakage comes not from launch noise, but from an explosive failure of the launch vehicle. The Antares LOX/RP first stage has a lot of energy, but not a big explosive yield compared to the 30,000 pound upper stage if it falls to the ground from a certain altitude. The phenomenon involved is called distant focussed overpressure (DFO), and plagues launches from VAFB because of the propinquity to Lompoc. Delta IV, whose explosive equivalent with hydrogen, poses far less of a problem at VAFB than did any of the Titan III or IV variants, with their large solid boosters.
Replacing the first stage of Antares with a solid or solids (two stages would actually be better) will elevate the DFO problem at Wallops to unworkable levels, IMHO.
Time for Aeroject-Rocketdyne to start working on actually producing staged combustion LOX/Kerosene rocket engines rather than just refurbishing them.
No shots will be heard, no team will be delivered. Jeff, surely JSCOM sequestration and recent loss of various multimillion dollar seals will move it to activate the recently delivery of Robonauts legs working in conjunction with Spheres and other DARPA funded drones to execute a silent Jett Lee esque surgical strike operation. 😉
Off-topic but Proton crashed. It seems to be a problem with the Briz-M upper stage again. Last time this happened it took a LONG time to fix it.
So last year, when they crashed their last one and quickly found out it was inverted angle and rate sensors at fault, is now the Good Old Days? Fun times in the Russian Federation. If I was a religious man, I’d be thinking God must love Elon Musk a lot!