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A Soyuz with a booster - a Blok D - launched on Proton together would be much cheaper and likely much safer than a Shuttle launch. That would be enough to get t
by avmich 3y ago
A Soyuz with a booster - a Blok D - launched on Proton together would be much cheaper and likely much safer than a Shuttle launch. That would be enough to get to 540 km height orbit, bring two or three people there, bring spares, make an EVA (the orbital module of Soyuz was designed partially to be able to do EVAs), and come back. The Blok D would have a docking module so Soyuz would connect to it and use it to raise (and lower) the orbit as needed.
- Pat_Murph 3y agoThe repair mission couldn't have been done by Eva only. There was to much work and it would have taken forever and most of it couldn't have been done with their suits since it was very precise work. They had to take it into the shuttle's cargo bay to do the repairs. They worked on it for 5 days and changed the faulty instruments and also changed the solar array and gyroscopes. Correct me if I'm wrong but Soyuz just doesn't have the capacity to do that type of mission.
- avmich 3y agoThis is, of course, a stretch - requires to have a really good relationships between USA and Russia. But technically, bringing Hubble to the Shuttle cargo bay doesn't change things much. Ok, the telescope isn't flying anywhere - but if you have a Soyuz nearby, you could also attach it to Hubble firmly enough, just as with Shuttle. And just as with Shuttle you can't avoid having to work with the instrument in spacesuits - since you can't bring Hubble into the pressurized environment where the spacesuits are not needed. So, I don't know for sure how many technical details should be overcome for that mission to work - but in principle you at least can get to the Hubble with something different than the Shuttle. Today it could be the Crew Dragon, and 10 years ago it could be Soyuz.