Oberg: Commercial Space Taxis May Not Be as Hard To Build As You Think

Jim Oberg has an interesting take on MSNBC today on why commercial space taxis may be easier to build than many people think. He points out that with the decision to use Orion technology to build a Crew Return Vehicle, for example, the commercial taxis will not have to be designed with an on-orbit dwell time of six months as do Russia’s Soyuz. spacecraft. They have a relatively simple and straightfoward mission and, he argues, the spacecraft could be “spartan” from a comfort perspective — like food.

Surely not everyone will agree with Oberg. He suggests that the spacecraft would only have to be capable of independent flight for 24 hours, with a maximum emergency flight time of 48 hours. One can certainly imagine contingencies that would take more time than that to resolve. Perhaps Oberg’s most provocative suggestion is that sometimes failure might indeed be an option: “There should be no compromise when it comes to reducing the risk of crew injury or death. But the risks of mission failure should most definitely be re-evaluated under these new circumstances. Failure may sometimes be an option.”