Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!know!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!rutgers!rochester!sol!yamauchi From: yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi) Newsgroups: sci.space Subject: Re: LLNL Astronaut Delivery (was Re: You Can't Expect a Space Station) Message-ID: Date: 6 Nov 90 08:47:28 GMT References: <9011051658.AA20403@iti.org> <2666@polari.UUCP> Sender: news@cs.rochester.edu (Usenet news) Organization: University of Rochester Lines: 46 In-Reply-To: crad@polari.UUCP's message of 6 Nov 90 03:15:50 GMT In article <2666@polari.UUCP> crad@polari.UUCP (Charles Radley) writes: [ quoting Allen quoting me ] >How *is* LLNL planning to get astronauts up to the station? +Put a capsule on a Delta. >Are they planning to use the shuttle or develop their own spacecraft? +They plan to develop their own. For $200M they could buy a ACRV or +a Soyuz for $50M. We have built lots of capsules in the last 30 years +so I don't think it needs to be that expensive. - Soyuz is not available, how can LLNL have it in their plan ? A capsule of $ 200 M is inadequate, as a minimum a Gemini type vehicle is required which is more like $ 2 - 3 B. Remember you need long duration EVA, it may take a couple of weeks to get a failed LLNL fully deployed. As I understand it, LLNL is not planning on developing a spacecraft which can deploy the Earth Station under a "worst-case" scenario, just a simple capsule which can get the astronauts into orbit. It's prohibitively expensive to cover all possible failure modes. The worst case scenario for any space station is a launch explosion, but in order to cover for this, you would need to make backups for all of your modules. Is this going to be done for Freedom? Evidently, LLNL does not consider the possibility of a complete deployment failure to be worth $2-3 B, which seems reasonable to me since this would probably exceed the entire projected development cost of the Earth Station. If we had access to Soyuz and Soviet technology, the cheapest approach would be to scrap LLNL and use Mir. If you just wanted to do microgravity research, then this might be true, but the Earth Station is not designed for microgravity research -- it's designed for artificial gravity research and to support the Gas Station as part of the larger mission to establish permanent manned bases on both the moon and Mars. -- _______________________________________________________________________________ Brian Yamauchi University of Rochester yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu Computer Science Department _______________________________________________________________________________