Canceling the tracker layer upgrade to the spectrometer would also not be catastrophic. The addition of a silicon tracker layer on top of the detector would increase the amount of data from the physics experiment of $ 2 billion in the next five years by a factor of three. However, the experiment has been in operation since 2011, so it has had enough time to collect information about dark matter and other fundamental physics in the universe.
Cut crews to size
The real striking proposal in NASA's options is reducing the crew size from four to three.
Usually crew Dragon Missions wear two NASA astronauts, a Roscosmos Cosmonaut and an international partner Astronaut. That is why, although it seems that NASA would only reduce its crew size by 25 percent, it would actually be the number of NASA astronauts on crews dragon scores by 50 percent. In general, this would lead to a decrease in science of about a third of the science of the space station. (This is because there are usually three NASA astronauts at the station: two of Dragon and one on each Soyuz flight.)
It is difficult to see how this would lead to enormous cost savings. Yes, NASA should marginal fewer freight missions to provide fewer astronauts. And there would be some reduction in training costs. But it seems a bit crazy to spend tens of years and more than $ 100 billion with building an orbital laboratory, which makes all these efforts to develop commercial vehicles to deliver the station and increase the crew, to set up a rigorous training program to ensure that maximum science is ready and then say, say, 'Well, we don't really want to use it. '
NASA has not publicly announced the astronauts who will fly on crew-12 next year, but according to sources it has already assigned veteran Astronaut Jessica Meir and newcomer Jack Hathaway, a former American naval hunter hunter who was assigned to Nasa's Astronaut Corps in 2021. If these changes continue, one of these two would be removed from the mission.
