Enlarge / Johnson Space Center Director Ellen Ochoa and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden are seated inside a mock-up of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. Chris Ferguson, of Boeing, describes the interior of the spacecraft. (credit: NASA)
Senior managers in NASA’s International Space Station program have begun internal discussions about the possibility of buying additional Soyuz seats for US astronauts in 2019, two sources have told Ars. Although any final decision will likely come after the presidential election, the issue is “on people’s minds” at Johnson Space Center as confidence in operational commercial crew flights beginning from US soil by or before 2019 is shaky.
Ars understands that NASA has not formally broached the topic with Roscosmos, the Russian space agency which builds the Soyuz spacecraft and rockets and manages their launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Negotiations would need to begin fairly soon, however, as it typically takes as long as three years of lead time for the Russians to manufacture additional launch vehicles.
Uncertainty in the production timelines for Boeing and SpaceX, which are both developing capsules to carry humans to the space station, has driven contingency discussions about additional seats at the Houston-based space center. Publicly, NASA has maintained the hope that at least one private vehicle would be capable of operational missions by the end of 2017 or early 2018. Boeing has already slipped its schedule into early 2018, however. SpaceX has maintained the possibility of a later 2017 launch date, but with its recent accident, delays seem inevitable. Privately, NASA planners are concerned about additional delays that might slip those schedules further, into 2019.
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Source: Ars Technica – NASA officials mulling the possibility of purchasing Soyuz seats for 2019