Or at least NASA’s not counting on one:
NASA will pay $335 million to Russia for four round-trip flights to the International Space Station in 2013 and 2014 under the terms of a new deal announced today by the American space agency.
The contract extends previous agreements with the Russians that ensure the station can keep a six-member crew after NASA retires the shuttle this year.
I wonder what the termination clause is if there is a decision to extend?
Let’s see, we can pay the Russians 335 million or extend the shuttle for 2.4 billion. I don’t know, that’s really a tough one for me. I am not very good at math.
Well yeah, if they retire Shuttle they have no alternative to man ISS other than buy sets with the Russians on Soyuz. Ironic I know. Who would predict something like this would happen before the Soviet Union collapsed.
What is more pathetic is how NASA consistently started and failed (or killed) so many proposed Shuttle replacement projects (NASP, X-33, X-34, SLI, CEV, etc).
A Shuttle extension is merely prolonging the inevitable. The upgrades were nice. However to get significant cost savings the whole system needs to be redesigned. Merely changing a part here or there is not good enough. I would have liked to have seen DC-X and X-34 like vehicles. Maybe they will happen but I doubt NASA will be the ones doing them.
That is $335 million that would be better spent with Elon Musk.
I thought a round trip ticket in a Russian seat to the ISS was $20 million on the open market. Two seats on four trips should be about $160 million. Correct? Seems NASA isn’t a very good negotiator.
The price of a ‘tourist seat’ on the Soyuz has been climbing, last I heard something north of $35 million. So NASA is only paying about a 50% premium, more or less.
Look, you gotta understand that in the spirit of the Prague deal and all that, it’s all part of the campaign to be nice to Putin so he will be nice to us. And for the same reason Putin should get to keep all the money if the Shuttle extends.
We are nice people. Also guilty of many crimes against the world. Wow, if only we’d realized that 70 years ago we could have been nice enough to Adolf and Joe Stalin and Tojo and prevented WWII. But we are SUCH obtuse warmongers in this country.
[Footnote after the sarcasm: Actually, NASA says it pays more since its astros have to be qualified to actually fly the Soyuz, whereas the space “tourists” only have to learn emergency measures and minor duties.]
Are the Russians charging NASA more because the agency is a pain in the ass to deal with? Or are they offering a typical “government bargain” of charging higher prices for quantity purchases? Perhaps they know that NASA has no alternative so the Russians can charge whatever they want. Look for the price to continue to go up until some alternative means of transportation is available.
“Nice space station you have there, NASA? Do you actually want to send people there?”
I dunno why people are complaining. Yeah differentiated pricing policies suck. However if you knew anything about differentiated pricing, you would know that the goal for the seller is to jack the price to the limit a buyer can bear. The US Government can pay more than a private citizen. Seems like the Russians learned capitalism pretty fast.
Jardinero1,
[[[Let’s see, we can pay the Russians 335 million or extend the shuttle for 2.4 billion. I don’t know, that’s really a tough one for me. I am not very good at math.]]]
I will help 🙂
$335 million for 4 seats equals $83.73 million per seat.
Extend Shuttle for $2.4 using the 4 ET available from space parts would equal $75 million maximum a seat – it assumes zero cost assigned to the 200,000 lbs of cargo the Shuttle could carry as well.
Or if you split the allocate half of the $2.4 billion cost to cargo you would get $37.5 a seat.
Either way its clear Shuttle is cheaper per seat then Soyuz.
Thomas, you are lowballing the cost of four additional Shuttle flights, whereas the Soyuz is a legally enforceable contractual agreement. Even if your numbers turn out correct it’s not a win, because to crew the ISS requires fewer seats but to fly more often than Shuttle. Your comparison is a bit like having a jet double the size of a 747 fly between LA and Tokyo but only once a week instead of once a day and then expecting to get more business than your competitor with a daily flight of a jet half the size of a 747, just because you charge slightly less. Transportation doesn’t work like that. Timeliness wrt when the customer need to fly is usually very important, and this is certainly true in the case of the ISS with its variety of rotation schedules.
Mike, larry j, etc., the reason the tourists get charged less than NASA is because they are not buying specific seats, they are buying spare seats and have to fly whenever the seat becomes available not at a time they can choose. It’s much like shopping for airline seats: if you don’t have to fly on a busy day and don’t mind getting the middle seat on a redeye, you can fly for half or less the price of your fellow more spoiled or wealthy or business passengers who pay the full price. Because the marginal costs to an airline of adding a passenger once they’ve already committed to make a flight are low, they prefer to deeply discount any unsold seats rather than leave them unsold. The cost to the Russian supplier to fly a tourist on a spare seat is discounted for the same kinds of reasons: they already have decided they need to fly their cosmonauts at a certain time but they have a spare seat. Putting somebody in that seat costs very little, what we might call “marginal squared” costs, marginal already because the launcher and capsule development costs have already long since been payed for, and marginal of that because it’s a spare seat.
NASA OTOH is basically buying complete flights that go on NASA’s schedule, so the Russian supplier must bear the full marginal costs of flying an extra flight for NASA.
Thinking about the above explains another big barrier to the fantasy of a subsidy-free orbital tourism market, even if there were demand for it: in a real market for the provider to make a profit, they couldn’t just charge profit plus marginal costs, much less the profit plus margin-squared costs that Soyuz charges: they’d have to price it to amortize the R&D *plus* the marginal costs *plus* profit. Which would easily run well over $100 million per seat unless they radically reduced launch costs, which is not something that can be done by getting into bed with the NASA HSF bureaucracy. At $100 million per seat there is quite likely not private demand for even a single seat much less even a single launch much less the many launches that would be required to amortize the R&D. So orbital tourism as a real market, rather than as an infrequent marginal-squared cost opportunity on already government-bought Soyuz flights, is an economic fantasy for the foreseeable future.
Suborbital tourism, BTW, is far more realistic and IMHO has a good shot at garnering humble but sufficient revenue. Most of the marketing gimmicks people want to try for orbital tourism are more likely to be seriously tried much sooner for suborbital. Richard Branson has one, a reality show contest to win a seat on SS2 (still called “Astronaut Idol”?) which is planned to appear in 4 episodes on the National Geographic Channel:
http://blog.taragana.com/e/2010/01/18/soon-sir-richard-bransons-space-tourism-reality-show-81627/
Just to be devil’s advocate here.. Does anyone expect them to stop if shuttle extension happens or a new crew launcher becomes available? Tracy Caldwell Dyson just went up in the Soyuz.. and the shuttle launched 2 days later.. it would appear that the availability of a crew launcher has nothing to do with the demand for Soyuz seats from NASA.
Trent,
Actually it doesn’t. Even if Shuttle is extended they will need 1-2 Soyuz capsules for emergency evacuation of the ISS.