How NASA and SpaceX Get Along Together 110
mblase writes "SpaceX and NASA have been working hard to make this weekend's launch happen — and that has meant navigating the cultural differences between this small, young startup and the huge veteran space agency. The relationship involves daily calls and emails between people who live in two different worlds: age versus youth, bureaucracy versus a flat startup-like structure, and a sense of caution versus a desire to move forward quickly. But they both have an almost religious belief in the need for humans to venture forth into space, a geeky love for rockets, and technical know-how — plus, they both need each other to succeed."
The launch is scheduled for 4:55AM EDT (08:55 GMT) tomorrow morning. NASA TV will begin coverage at 3:30AM EDT, and there will be a press conference at 8:30AM. SpaceX's press kit (PDF) has mission details. The rendezvous with the ISS is scheduled for day 4 of the mission after a series of maneuvering tests to ensure the Dragon capsule can approach safely. It carries 1,200 pounds of supplies for the people aboard the ISS, and it carries 11 science experiments designed by students.
Re:Too damn Early (Score:5, Interesting)
Go buy Kerbal Space Program [kerbalspaceprogram.com], get a ship in orbit, then launch a second one to go chase after the first ship in orbit. Even if your launches are only a few hours apart, it's difficult to match orbit (speeding up to "catch up" with the ISS causes your orbit to go all egg shaped).
I've been playing that damn game for about 3 weeks now and I have yet to successfully complete an orbital rendezvous. Matching orbits is hard. Space is hard. If this shit were free and easy, North Korea would have a manned space station already.
NASA makes it look easy, but the fact of the matter is you've got objects zipping through low earth orbit at tens of thousands (17,500 mph generally), and if you're off by "only" 500mph, well, hope you're not on a collision course with the station. Imagine roughly the same result of your car hitting a brick wall at 500mph.
TL;DR you've got to launch that shit when you have to, no ifs, ands, or buts. Apollo moon missions don't have a rendezvous element so they had the option of launching during prime time.
Re:The pathetic US space program (Score:5, Interesting)
Space launch has cost $10K/lb or so since 1960.
This isn't a law of physics.
NASA has systematically proved incapable of lowering launch cost - their primary contractors have no interest in doing this, and they are biased to 'clever' rather than 'workable' solutions. And then there is the problem that NASA has to spend money politically, not efficiently. It's largely a welfare organisation for aerospace - it's not a space organisation.
One of the last attempts at lowering launch costs - X33 - had three separate untried technologies on it.
SpaceX is taking a rather different tack - using shiny stuff only when it has a major benefit.
Their next rocket is planned to come in at around $1K/lb.
And they're thinking of reusability, to lower the costs to well below this.
Fuel costs are around $5/lb.
http://www.spacex.com/multimedia/videos.php [spacex.com] - this is a cool video on their reusable design.
And this is a picture of the hardware - the foldable landing legs for the first stage of the Falcon 9.
http://img.ly/i5JQ [img.ly]
The space program isn't pathetic because of the lack of money being spent on it.
If you take the funding from SLS, up to the first couple of launches, and use it to buy commercial launches on SpaceX - you get comfortably enough launch to lift the USS Iowa - closing on 200 times the mass of ISS.
And this assumes that SpaceX can't get reusability working.
If they can, then multiply these numbers by a _large_ number.
Re:The pathetic US space program (Score:3, Interesting)