Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Inspector General’s Report On ISS

7 Comments

I’m reading it now. It starts out with a nice brief history of space stations in general and of the ISS itself. Apparently it says that commercial crew will cost more than Soyuz. I want to see the basis of that statement.

[Update a while later]

“Although the risks involved in space exploration are apparent and subject to mitigation,
NASA cannot fully eliminate them.”

Someone should write a book about that. Oh, wait.

7 thoughts on “The Inspector General’s Report On ISS”

  1. Considering that right now Bigelow Aerospace is currently offering SpaceX flights to a BA space facility at 26.25 million per seat which includes 2 months room and board and they also offer Boeing flights at 36.75 it is hard to understand how that is more expensive than a 71 million per seat charge for soyuz.

    Unless they are including development costs and NASA will pay more than a standard commerial rate.

  2. I may be mistaken, but I think the crew rotations to ISS will be four seats per flight under commercial crew, not seven seats as Bigelow plans. That drives the per seat cost of CST-100 to $63M, almost even with $70M per seat on Soyuz. Add in extra analyses for launching NASA astronauts, and it’s probably a wash. I think this would have been true for Dreamchaser, or anyone else who launched on an Atlas V 4xx at ~$200M a pop.

    SpaceX will still be cheaper thanks to F9, but if the numbers above are optimistic, their savings may be swamped by the Boeing contract. In fact, that’s what we’re already seeing in the totals for yesterday’s awards, which include options for seven flights. A second, low-cost launch provider (c’mon, Blue Origin) can’t emerge soon enough.

    1. Yes it is planned for a person rotation but it also said they would be taking up cargo. That would have to be factored in, probably would not be enough to offset it all.

  3. Given the level of competency (the lack thereof) in all levels of the Federal Government these days, I’m frankly astounded that they seem to be able to tell ISS and ISIS apart.

    Then again, arming the Syrian rebels will be equally effective against both ISS and ISIS, so maybe there’s no need to differentiate one from the other?

    As for Soyuz being cheaper… If you assume only a few flights for commercial crew and roll the development cost into it, then yep, Soyuz is a bit cheaper. But that’s a false savings; without commercial crew, we don’t have manned access to space, and we’re at Russia’s mercy.

  4. I’ll come up with that conclusion easily! Follow these steps:

    1. Believe Commercial Crew is a bad idea.
    2. Believe that SLS/Orion is the only way astronauts should go into space, and that paying for seats on Russian spacecraft is a necessary evil that we can live with until SLS/Orion flies.
    3. Divide the SpaceX award ($2.6B) by the cost per seat of flying on Russian craft (estimated at $70M) and find that it will take more than 37 seats to orbit to balance out just the cost of this contract. The Boeing award would produce a higher number of flights required.
    4. Ignore any pertinent data.

    QED

Comments are closed.