en-us https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3919/1 Comments from The Space Review: The role of global cooperation in space after COVID-19 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3919/1#IDComment1089230521If we are serious about using the highly capable international Orion, SLS, nuclear thermal rocket technology, and various spacecraft, space technologies, and launchers to enable the mining of the Moon, asteroids, and Mars and its moons, we need the financial, technical, and political stability and support offered by international missions by businesses and governments from many free and democratic nations. Fri, 17 Apr 2020 22:51:21 +0000https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3919/1#IDComment1089230521 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3919/1#IDComment1089200723Ok let me get ahead of a number of replies and say that YES there will be seats on the Orion as well (apparently). Seats on that vehicle may be more reserved for citizens of the US if the current nationalist emphasis continues but seats might be available for international partners as well. Fri, 17 Apr 2020 04:36:34 +0000https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3919/1#IDComment1089200723 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3919/1#IDComment1089187194Many of us have been fortunate enough to work on a number of international programs like Shuttle, Spacelab, NASA/Mir, and ISS. My opinion is that the Shuttle is the best model for a program though it required our partners to justify appearing to be a junior partner in the enterprise. Many international crew members flew on the Shuttle but they all had to work primarily from English language documentation. On Spacelab, the Germans and Japanese had their own missions so they were able to exert a lot more control, this probably made it easier to justify the high expenses. But by integrating with an existing program their people and experiments were able to be manifested a lot faster. In the NASA/Mir program where we started off sending astronauts to Mir, we started off integrating with the Russian system and that has caused problems that are still with us today. We spent far far too much time translating every document (even some that were not relevant) which caused increased delay and costs. The ISS has adapted and is working efficiently today but the new Artemis program has gotten off to a difficult start. The US administration has proclaimed that it is a national program designed to compete with potential partners instead of finding synergism. The most effective program would be one where all cooperating countries would trade hardware, software, support, etc for seats - like we did on Shuttle. The enterprise would use the "available" vehicles which are the Dragon and Starliner and seats would be exchanged for support. After the system was more mature, various countries would be able to sponsor their own programs very similarly to how Japan flew the Spacelab-J mission. As we gained experience, countries like India could then build compatible systems starting with subsystems and building towards entire missions. Initially, countries like India would build experiments using Interface Control Documents (ICDs) and as long as their systems interfaced with the rest of the system it would fly. We would be smart to avoid the need to translate every document, build panels that would accept many different connectors, etc etc. Thu, 16 Apr 2020 18:33:42 +0000https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3919/1#IDComment1089187194