Over at Pajamas Media today, I have a story on the latest shenanigans by the Russians to maintain their monopoly on providing lifeboats and (after we retire the Shuttle later this year) crew transportation for the International Space Station. California-based Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) could compete with them, starting later this year, at least for provisioning cargo, once they demonstrate that their Dragon capsule can rendezvous and dock with the station.
With the addition of a life-support system (currently under development), they could take over lifeboat duties, with a system that can return seven instead of three (as the Russian Soyuz does), potentially allowing an increase in station crew size. That could be done in as little as a year. With the addition of a launch abort system (under development with a recent NASA contract) that could be available within three years, they could offer rides to orbit for twenty million a seat, instead of the sixty-three million that the Russians recently jacked up their price to, knowing that they will have a monopoly with the upcoming end of the Shuttle program.
But on Friday, the Russian Space Agency, which is a partner in the ISS program, announced that it may not allow the Dragon to dock unless they can be assured of its “safety.” This is a little rich, coming from an agency that recently returned one of our astronauts to earth with an untested new digital guidance system in the Soyuz (fortunately, all went well), and has injured crew in the past few years with two harder-than-anticipated landings. They have never objected to the Japanese or European robot craft that have docked to the ISS, but then, those didn’t threaten their crewed spaceflight monopoly.
As I note in the Pajamas piece, this is all the result of feckless and reckless space policy, not just for years but for decades, from both Democrat and Republican administrations, in which pork reigns over progress, and no one, other than those with NASA jobs in their districts or states, cares about space, until the next tragedy occurs. For the cynical amusement and edification of my readers, I put together a little robot theater on the subject of the Russians a few weeks ago.
Sadly, it still applies.
