Playing hardball
The director of Russia’s manned program told the press today that the Russians do not have that a signed contract with NASA to fly astronauts to ISS after 2015, despite NASA’s announcement that such an agreement exists.
If true, NASA’s management has committed a very serious error which will cost the U.S. a great deal of money in the coming years, especially if there are significant delays in getting the new commercial companies online to provide the U.S. an American capability for ferrying humans to orbit.
Since they became capitalists following the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russians have become very good and tough negotiators. Once you have a signed agreement with them, you can rely on them to fulfill their part of the bargain, to the letter. The key phrase, however, is “to the letter.” If you miss something in the negotiations, they will demand and get every possible additional penny they can from you. And if you don’t pay up, you won’t get it.
For example, I remember talking to a scientist back in the 1990s who had made a deal with the Russians to have them install an experiment on the outside of Mir. They agreed, and had their cosmonauts do a spacewalk to put the experiment in place. However, the scientist had failed to include in the deal any firm arrangements for retrieving his experiment, and found that it was going to cost him a fortune to get it back, money his budget didn’t have. When I spoke to him, he had been waiting more than a year, and had no idea when or even if the Russians would ever retrieve his data.
If NASA doesn’t have a signed contract for crew transport after 2015, and they end up needing that service from the Russians, expect the Russians to take advantage of this situation and demand the highest fees they can. Expect the price to go up a lot,
Ironically, this might not be a bad thing, as it will create an opportunity for the newer commercial companies in the U.S. to charge more themselves and still undercut the Russians. In fact, these higher prices will give us a clearer idea of the true value of manned space exploration.
All told, the industry might actually be helped by this incompetence of NASA’s management.
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