No More Free Ride 

Now, here's a potentially interesting bit of news from AP:
Russia will begin charging the United States for delivering astronauts and cargo to the international space station starting next year, the head of the Federal Space Agency said Wednesday. ...
"If the Americans want to fly Soyuz (spacecraft) in 2005, they will have to compensate us the costs," space agency head Anatoly Perminov said, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency.
There are two scenarios in which this news doesn't really matter much. The first is that the Shuttle begins flying again in March, and is able to resume crew rotation duties beginning with Expedition 11. This would require some unconventional decisions. The ISS increments since the STS-107 disaster have been six months long, based on the Soyuz rotation schedule. The longest increment, Expedition 4, was 6 1/2 months long. STS-114, which is scheduled to launch No Earlier Than March 6, will not be a crew rotation mission, and the next flight after that, STS-121, isn't scheduled until no earlier than May. Meaning that either Exp. 10, scheduled to launch in October, would have to be the longest Station mission to date while waiting for the Shuttle to bring replacements, or Exp. 11 would have to launch on the Soyuz TMA-6 in April, which would mean one NASA flight on Soyuz once compensation requirements are in effect.
That said, however, there has been talk, and I haven't seen a final decision, that NASA may stop using Shuttle for crew rotation. There are several more Station assembly flights that have to be carried out before the 2010 Shuttle retirement deadline, and by switching crew rotation from Shuttle to Soyuz and using Shuttle solely for assembly, NASA can remove a few flights from the schedule, making it easier to meet the deadline. This, of course, would mean being "charged" for several Soyuz flights.
The other scenario in which this is relatively inconsequential is that Rosaviakosmos is referring to "in-kind" compensation. In-kind has been the main currency of the Station thus far, primarily in the form of man-hours. For example, during the EVA prior to the one yesterday, Russian equipment had to be used for tasks that were supposed to be done with U.S. equipment. In exchange for the use of Russian equipment, Rosaviakosmos charged NASA a number of astronaut work hours. It's not that big a deal, since Russia already owes the U.S. a pretty heft number of man-hours, so U.S. in-kind contributions to Russia at this point consist of reducing that debt.
Which leads to the final scenario, which would be a big deal--NASA does have to use Soyuz for one or more crew rotations, and Rosaviakosmos isn't talking about in-kind contributions. In other words, NASA would have to pay cash for Soyuz seats, which the agency is prohibited from doing by the Iran Nonproliferation Act.
This possibility has been hinted at several times over the past year, and one almost has to assume it's a Russian bluff to get the U.S. to repeal INA and start sending much-needed cash to Rosaviakosmos. But, if not--ESA would almost certainly be willing to pay for a Soyuz seat if there were an available position in an Expedition crew due to NASA not having a way to get there.
It'll be interesting to see how this develops.

:: :: 08:07 :: David :: [permalink] ::