Senior managers in NASA’s International Space Station program have begun internal discussions about the possibility of buying additional Soyuz seats for US astronauts in 2019, two sources have told Ars. Although any final decision will likely come after the presidential election, the issue is “on people’s minds” at Johnson Space Center as confidence in operational commercial crew flights beginning from US soil by or before 2019 is shaky.

Ars understands that NASA has not formally broached the topic with Roscosmos, the Russian space agency which builds the Soyuz spacecraft and rockets and manages their launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Negotiations would need to begin fairly soon, however, as it typically takes as long as three years of lead time for the Russians to manufacture additional launch vehicles.

Uncertainty in the production timelines for Boeing and SpaceX, which are both developing capsules to carry humans to the space station, has driven contingency discussions about additional seats at the Houston-based space center. Publicly, NASA has maintained the hope that at least one private vehicle would be capable of operational missions by the end of 2017 or early 2018. Boeing has already slipped its schedule into early 2018, however. SpaceX has maintained the possibility of a later 2017 launch date, but with its recent accident, delays seem inevitable. Privately, NASA planners are concerned about additional delays that might slip those schedules further, into 2019.

On Thursday, the director of Johnson Space Center, Ellen Ochoa, expressed optimism but not certainty about the private company timelines. “We think it’s very doable to have it in 2018, but you’re always just month to month with the progress,” the former astronaut told Ars. Asked about the SpaceX accident, she added, “It’s really hard to say what that impact will be. I would just say both companies are extremely committed. They are working well with us.”

A politically painful decision

A decision to buy seats almost certainly won’t be made until December or later, because such an action would be politically painful for the space agency. While it is true that Congress and the President agreed to retire the space shuttle after its final flight in 2011, no one in Washington DC was happy with the gap in US human spaceflight capabilities after the shuttle’s end

During the first half of this decade, Congress exacerbated this gap by under-funding the commercial crew program, in which NASA gave contracts to several companies for crew transport spacecraft that were significantly cheaper than NASA could have developed. The lower-than-requested funding, totaling more than $1 billion over the course of several years, led to delays in initial flights from 2015 to 2017.

But since NASA down-selected to just Boeing and SpaceX in September 2014, Congress has increased its funding level to more closely align with NASA’s requests. The agency’s own inspector general, Paul Martin, recently concluded that schedule delays beyond 2017 were due to technical challenges with the spacecraft’s design rather than funding issues.

With that in mind, Congress will not be positively predisposed to funding requests for additional Russian seats, especially because the price keeps going up. Since the decision to retire the space shuttle in 2009, the Russian price for a seat has skyrocketed from about $30 million for a trip into orbit to $81.9 million for each of the six seats NASA bought for 2018. (This has led more than one aerospace insider to quip, “The Russians are the best capitalists of all.") It seems likely the price for any seats in 2019 would increase substantially, especially because NASA would be providing less than the three years of lead time as is customary for such orders.

Trading seats

Another wrinkle that NASA must contend with is how to handle trades for seats on commercial crew spacecraft after they begin flying. That is because when Boeing’s Starliner and SpaceX’s Dragon capsules launch from Florida, they will carry one Russian astronaut in addition to the NASA and any international partner astronauts on board. This is to ensure that every crew that goes to the station has representation of the two main partners, the United States and Russia.

The way it works now is that there is an “A-line” Soyuz and, three months later, a “B-line” spacecraft, with a total of four launches a year. The A-line vehicle carries two Russians and one American, and the B-line vehicle typically has one NASA astronaut, one Russian, and one international partner. When the commercial crew vehicles begin flying, there will likely be a Soyuz launch, then a commercial vehicle, then a Soyuz, and so on. Essentially, a Starliner or Dragon will replace the B-line Soyuz now in the schedule.

The wrinkle is that it has not been determined how NASA and Roscosmos will trade their seats. For example, one source familiar with the issue said it was unlikely that Russia would pay a comparable amount for a seat on a US commercial vehicle that NASA pays for Soyuz transport. (They might argue, for example, that the US vehicle is still in an experimental mode.) In any case, this may provide an additional point of negotiation—and Congressional consternation—if NASA decides it needs to purchase additional seats in 2019.