ISS gets funding until 2024

[2takesfrakes]

It's got to be cheaper keeping what's already been launched into space up there. I've never been particularly impressed with the "benefits" the people of Earth have gotten from the International Space Station, myself. It's kind of like that Intergalactic gesture - STAR TREK V's Nimbus III, "The Planet of Galactic Peace," in that regard. Keep on growing your unusually large crystals up there, boys ... we've got you funded.

 

[Amaris]

Ah, sorry. Guess I didn't proof read that last post I made carefully. You're going to have to point out how I ignored "everything else you said", though, since all I did was expand on exactly what Orion is and it's mission.

Yes, crew and cargo to ISS is a backup role for Orion. One saddled on it by congress. Now lets look at the reality of it filling that role. To get it there in the near future we have 2 probable launch vehicles, SLS and DeltaIV Heavy. The DeltaIVH, while operational, is not man rated and will take years and millions of dollars to do so. The SLS is in a word, overkill. It can lift 70 tons of payload to orbit of which Orion is a small part of. Now the issue with that is the fact that it costs roughly half a billion per launch and has a projected flight rate of only twice per year. To make things worse, there's no money in NASA's budget to make use of the excess payload capability for a trip to ISS using SLS. They'll have to use ballast. Now, we've got a half billion dollar rocket doing milk runs to ISS to carry mostly ballast.

So yes, Orion can:
A. carry crew
B. carry cargo
C. serve as backup transport to ISS

Will it ever do C? I hope not.

Did I make anymore grammatical errors?

There were no grammatical errors in that post, no.
On another note, thank you for getting my original point without the need for further discussion on irrelevancies and non-sequiturs.