Eric Berger has the story. But no mention of when they could do this, other than “later this decade.” What’s the constraint? As far as I know, nothing except the lifeboat issue. NASA insists (irrationally in my opinion — we have no such capability for Scott/Amundsen in the southern winter) that it must be able to evacuate the entire crew all the way to earth in an emergency, and since a Soyuz can only handle three, the maximum crew with two of them docked is thus six.

What would it be worth to get that extra researcher aboard? Again, someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but most crew time is taken up with maintenance functions of the facility, leaving only one crew member available for the actual research for which the thing was ostensibly built. If true, that means that adding another crew member would effectively double the amount of utility from the facility (presumably, CASIS would know). That is, if we get (say) four thousand hours a year of scientific research at the ISS with six crew (I’m assuming more than a forty-hour week, obviously), we might get to eight thousand with that seventh crew member. If it’s costing three billion a year to maintain, that drops the cost per hour from $750K/hr to only $375K/hr. Still ridiculously high, but a relative bargain.

What is such research time really worth? Likely a lot less than that, of course, but suppose someone were willing to pay $50K/hr for ISS research. That would mean that the extra crewperson would be worth $200M/yr. A different way of looking at it is, how much would the marginal cost of that person be were we to accelerate the time line? To answer that question means that we have to understand what is involved in such an acceleration.

If Dragon had a life-support system (even one only good for a couple hours) and couches, it has demonstrated its ability to serve as a lifeboat now, except for one issue — it has no independent docking/undocking capability, and won’t until it gets a NASA Docking System (NDS) as part of Commercial Crew. But despite what Skip Hatfield says in the linked Space Safety piece, even the system it used for the berthing could be used to undock in an emergency, by just releasing it and backing off with thrusters. Similarly, Boeing could probably have a CST sitting there within year or so, after a test flight to demonstrate its entry capability (as Dragon did in 2010), given sufficient funds. The long pole in its use as a crew module are development and testing of the abort system, which is unnecessary if it is used as a lifeboat. If I were CASIS, I’d ask SpaceX and Boeing how soon they could provide that service, and how much it would cost. Because, at least in theory, it’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The fact that this isn’t being accelerated while wasting billions on an unneeded rocket that won’t fly for many years (and is unlikely to ever fly) is just one more demonstration of the dysfunction of our space policy.