With sorry Soyuz stuffed, who's going to run NASA's space station taxi service now?

Viop phone

good post!

Groceries less of a problem....

1. Not many people up there.

2. Dragon, even if not crewed Crew Dragon, is capable at deliveries. As is the Nipponese craft, and a succession of ESA ones.

3. Progress!

4. A good Soyuz test would be groceries.

Crew, well, yes.

Bah!

If this were a movie and not real life we would have a scene where two NASA bigwigs (I'm thinking Clint Eastwood as the old duffer in a sinecure job and Dulé Hill as the new-broom director) would be strolling through a certain Kennedy Spaceport attraction while discussing the shortfall in vehicular inventory when one would say, well there *is* an option (and the other would say what, no, you're crazy! and so forth) as the camera swung round to show the men (or perhaps one is a woman - swap Clint Eastwood for Cloris Leachman) standing in front of Atlantis in all its glory as the music swells.

Later, a rag-tag team of former Thiokol employees cobble together a working rocket on which the Old Girl can hitch a lift into LEO carrying an if anything even more rag and quite a bit more tag pair of astronauts, maybe two who washed out of the shuttle program years before or, no! Who were due to fly but got shitcanned when he shuttle was pulled from service. One of these should be Jack Black because he's in everything and the other could be any hot property du jour.

Tension mounts when it turns out that the special rescue module (mothballed at Boeing years before but easily pressed into service by the Boeing CEO who should be like Jason Bourne or the last James Bond) has a stowaway - none other than the treacherous Doctor Smith!

A fight ensues in the shuttle just before docking and it turns out that Doctor Smith is an android with Elmers white glue for blood when his head gets pulled off by the astro who isn't Jack Black! Dr Smith's headless body goes berserk and smashes the shuttle controls, forcing the team to pilot her in on manual controls.

They rescue everyone on the ISS, but cannot undock because the door latch doesn't work! Jack Black, who it is revealed is some sort of electronic genius works with one of the astros from the ISS - maybe a Russian, NO! A Ukranian! - to improvise a conversion of Dr Smith's body into a telepresence Waldo, allowing everyone to escape in the nick of time.

We cut to some exciting CGI of the shuttle re-entering and some stock crises so the actors can shout at each other and work all those switches and levers, all the while an anxious CAPCOM played by that Idris Elbow limey actor tries to establish radio contact.

We cut to a picture of the shuttle breaking through the clouds and a cheer goes up. Montage of the astros returning home followed by a twilight shot of Cloris Leachman (or Clint Eastwood) on the stairs up to Atlantis' door patting the skin of the shuttle and saying "That'll do, girl, that'll do".

END CREDITS

BLOOPER REEL.

"...however, the engineering requirements..."

DOORS, and the associated Requirements Traceability, >>>AS IMPLEMENTED<<< by the usual PMP suspects, has set back humanity by about ten years per decade.

We'd have been on Mars by now if they'd restrict such onerous processes to *only* those >>>relatively<<< few requirements that are directly tied to Safety (perhaps 5% of the usual Requirements Traceability loadng).

If the spacecraft had curtains, the mindless PMP-imposed Requirements Management of the colour of the curtains would cost $10M. They'd demand formal testing to ensure the colour precisely matched the unnecessary overly-precise specification. There would be a 40-page report. They'd have to redo it because the calibration of the lighting was calibrated by an unapproved lab. They'd delay the launch for a year to recheck the colour of the curtains.

If you disagree, then you're just wrong. You've not seen it first hand.