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Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

    > What happens if US and Russian relations break down?

Isn't it literally the case that if the US wanted to send people into space on their own hardware they could do it with months of lead time with the Falcon 9, Delta IV etc.?

Those rockets aren't "human rated", but are they (particularly the Delta IV) any less safe then the Soyuz or Chinese rockets?

I.e. this seems more of a "we have some rockets, but it's cheaper to launch with the Russians" rather than "we can't do it" problem to me.

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We can launch things to space, yes. But we don't have any vehicles that have life support, abort, or re-entry capabilities. It would be a short, one-way trip.

So no, we really can't send anyone to space right now.

And the Soyuz is actually pretty safe, relatively speaking. Aside from two notable failures early on, Soyuz hasn't had a fatality in 27 years.

> We can launch things to space, yes. But we don't have any vehicles that have life support, abort, or re-entry capabilities.

Dragon has all three. The reason there are not people it right now is just that there is not enough experience with it to rule it safe. If the risk was ruled worth it, the very next CRS mission could take people up to the ISS.

While it does have "a life support system", this basically means ventilation and some environmental monitoring & control (incl. N2 and maybe O2 for repressurization). It does not mean that it can sustain a vertebrate let alone humans for a substantial period of time. Experiments sent to the ISS containg lifestock always have their own life support system embedded.

The integrated life support system is designed so astronauts can access Dragon while attached to the station, not to sustain them. It receives all utilities from the station and returns "used utilities" (i.e. consumed air) back to the station's systems. It cannot reprocess/regenerate the components by itself.

dragon V1 has no abort capability

dragon V2, scheduled to do its maiden flight sometime in 2017 will have.

Big problem for NASA: once they discontinued manned space flight, they now have a very hard time getting back into it. The Russians spacecraft is considered relatively safe because they are building upon a proven technology that has been "debugged" for decades now. NASA just has a prototype that hasn't proven anything yet, and I doubt it will be ready by 2023.

The decision to go for a lander with wings and wheels looked so progressive then, and looks so misguided from today's point of view. NASA could build upon decades of expertise with Apollo-like spacecrafts today in order to build their Orion. Having switched to a shuttle, now they have to begin from scratch.

The shuttle would have worked better without the military involvement (made the bird overly large) and pork barrel politics (solid boosters).

Observe that pork barreling is holding back any NASA options while the private companies are pushing forward.

We launched an Orion into orbit on top of a Delta IV, no? We could do that again and put people in if we were willing to accept the risk.

Orion has been launched once, on a short 4-hour test flight, during which it only orbited the Earth twice. That spacecraft is very, very different than the Orion that is scheduled to launch with humans inside in 2023. It's not a matter of being "willing to accept the risk" - it's just impossible. Safety is one of NASA's highest priorities, (if not the highest, especially after Columbia), so even considering doing such a thing would be unthinkable and is a non-starter. Even if you manage to somehow sidestep decades of a deeply ingrained culture of safety, it's just not even a possibility right now - significant portions of the spacecraft's design have yet to be finalized, and then you have to figure out how to manufacture it, and once you've actually manufactured it, it goes through several rounds of insane amounts of testing and revision before getting anywhere near the launchpad. Spaceflight is incredibly complex - even if NASA somehow managed to get a blank check (like it did during the early space race) there is still a very significant amount of work to be done that takes a very long time, no matter how much money you throw at it.

Aside of the fact that that was only a very early prototype, the Orion service module is actually not a NASA project – it’s actually contracted out to ESA.

And a crew module without a service module is not good for much.

If there were some extremely urgent problem, like if aliens showed up in orbit tomorrow and demanded we send an emissary, then no doubt it could be done pretty quickly.

The current commercial crew program is aiming for manned flight in August of next year. I'd give extremely good odds for that to slip, but 2018 is probably a pretty safe bet right now. And that's without a big sense of urgency driving things.

Manned flight meaning LEO.

Minutes, seconds, can make all the difference in some cases.

Months? We're fucked.

What kind of manned missions do you have in mind?

That's the point: we may not know until we have days or hours remaining to achieve them.

As far as I know, there's no party on earth who could execute a space mission on one month notice. And such a mission would have very little capabilities due to poor preparation time.

Whatever doomsday scenario you are concerned about, it's not a realistic goal.

And an impending catastrophe so urgent that it needed an immediate launch would be unlikely to leave Russia or China unaffected, so any breakdown in relations would be quickly put aside for the sake of [deflecting meteors/fighting alien invaders/saving the moon from being eaten by a giant space shark].

Sounds like a movie plot. This thread was going so well up top.

Either Russia or China could if properly motivated.

No, I very much doubt that. If there was a launch vehicle and space craft ready and waiting for integration, it would take about a month to get it on the pad and launched.

But there aren't any spare rockets lying around like that. And we're talking about a standard LEO mission, not a doomsday scenario one off special mission.

I think you underestimate the ability of the Slavs to Get Shit Done.

Do you know why they beat you into space? It certainly wasn't because they had a head start.

I love the idea of knowing exactly which failure scenarios are incoming.

Your universe sounds fun. Can I join?

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