SpaceX Launches Supplies to ISS, Including Its First 3D Printer 129
A "flawless" launch early Sunday from Cape Canaveral has sent a load of supplies on its way to the International Space Station aboard a Falcon 9-lofted SpaceX Dragon capsule. Food, care packages and provisions for NASA's astronauts make up more than a third of the cargo onboard Dragon. But the spacecraft also has experiments and equipment that will eventually help scientists complete 255 research projects in total, according to NASA. In Dragon's trunk, there's an instrument dubbed RapidScat, which will be installed outside the space station to measure the speed and direction of ocean winds on Earth. Among the commercially funded experiments onboard Dragon is a materials-science test from the sports company Cobra Puma Golf designed to build a stronger golf club.
Dragon is also hauling the first space-grade 3D printer, built by Made in Space, which will test whether the on-the-spot manufacturing technology is viable without gravity.
on youtube (Score:2, Informative)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH5EErE8QnI
So we just gave all this money (Score:1)
To people (Boing, et al) who couldn't launch a rocket of their own if they dropped it on a trampoline, and SpaceX casually brushes them aside with a fraction of the money and a homebrewed design?
No cronyism in that decision at all. Absolutely none.
Re:So we just gave all this money (Score:5, Funny)
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I think it's better as Boing, boing, boing!
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yes, they prefer using pogo sticks.
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A trampoline was never being considered.
Except by the Russians. Sort of. [slashdot.org]
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Re: So we just gave all this money (Score:2)
Where is Boeing's reusable, low-cost, kerosene (safe) launch vehicle?
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Right here [wikipedia.org]. (It's engineering, you can only get two out of three.)
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Nice try. X-37 isn't a launch vehicle, and its onboard OMS propulsion uses toxic hypergolics.
Re: So we just gave all this money (Score:1)
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Its launched on top of an Atlas V which uses Russian RD-180 engines. Next.
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The X-37 isn't the launch vehicle, it's the payload...
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SpaceX has achieved pretty much fuck all in its first decade compared to what Boeing was working on when it received its first (far smaller) government contracts.
Really? I thought Boeing was forced to build furniture after WW I. :-p
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Those must be the airline seats we're still sitting in.
Only 255 projects? (Score:5, Funny)
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They neglected a bit.
Re:oh wow (Score:4, Interesting)
Thing is, you're melting plastic and placing that melted plastic where you want it to be. In gravity and endless atmosphere this is easy, the gravity helps feed the raw materials through a hopper and ensure that the plastic stays where you place it, and the essentially endless atmosphere carries away noxious fumes so that you don't poison yourself. Unfortunately on a space station or in a spacecraft you have no effective gravity and a very limited atmosphere, so you cannot pollute nor can you rely on gravity to make things go where you want them.
Consider the effort and design that goes into the toilet. A simple act that humans have always done on Earth is not so simple in space, and millions of dollars have been spent to account for biology designed to function with gravity assistance when that gravity is not available.
Re:oh wow (Score:5, Informative)
The gravity helps feed the raw materials through a hopper? You think 3D printers use plastic pellets?
Have you ever seen a 3D printer in action in the last few years? They use plastic filament and can print upside-down without any problems. The fumes can probably be eliminated by using an enclosed printing space with a filtered exhaust, and the toxicity of the fumes lowered by using PLA instead of ABS.
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I expect some minor refinements to the chemistry could reduce the fumes from PLA considerably. PLA isn't just PLA - it's got other things mixed in. Plasticisers, dye, stabiliser, etc.
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Congratulations. You've just confused the mods. +2 Troll. You ought to win something.
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Thing is, you're melting plastic and placing that melted plastic where you want it to be. In gravity and endless atmosphere this is easy, the gravity helps feed the raw materials through a hopper and ensure that the plastic stays where you place it, and the essentially endless atmosphere carries away noxious fumes so that you don't poison yourself. Unfortunately on a space station or in a spacecraft you have no effective gravity and a very limited atmosphere, so you cannot pollute nor can you rely on gravity to make things go where you want them.
Gravity making things go where you want them?? Gravity is a limiting factor in terrestrial 3D printers! The plastic is loaded as a filament and is mechanically pushed through the nozzle so no gravity required there, and without gravity you could get much better overhangs without requiring supports.
As for the fumes it would be pretty easy to have the printer in a separate fume cupboard if they needed.
Re:oh wow (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd expect that from eight year olds, not adults.
Perhaps the problem is that you've lost hold of what makes 8-year-olds so delightful? There was a cynical curmudgeon about just about every technological advance throughout human history, and despite that flight is routine and inexpensive. Horseless carriages clog the roads. Skyscrapers crown cities. Nuclear reactors pump out gigawatts of electricity. Ships the size of skyscrapers ply the seas carrying stuff built by robots. We carry some significant percentage of all human knowledge in our pockets. At every step, there were doubters. You are that guy now.
If you want to manufacture stuff in space, you can't just jump right to space foundries and space smelters. Baby steps.
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We carry some significant percentage of all human information in our pockets.
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That is NOT what "Is that a rocket in your pocket or are you glad to just see me?" means.
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Does that Rocket want to be free?
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Launch costs are still falling. Technology is still improving. The technology is almost ready to colonise mars now - all that is lacking is the collective will to spend several trillion dollars and more than a few lives on mega-project that would take centuries to complete. That's a socio-political problem, not a technological one.
Why did we go to the moon? It was hugely expensive and the only benefit it brought was a slightly better understanding of the formation of the solar system based on recovered samp
Re:oh wow (Score:4, Interesting)
The technology is almost ready to colonise mars now
Not quite. With a lot of effort and a huge budget, we may be able to get a man on the surface, but that's a far cry from colonisation.
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I said 'almost.' If you assume money is no issue, getting things there is doable - been done for robots, just needs scaling up. Landing large structures without parachutes (Mars atmosphere is very thing) has been done too - lunar lander module. Higher gravity poses some issue, but doable. What remains is long-term-independant life support systems - something capable of running for years between resupplies. That we don't have the technology for, yet. But it doesn't require any new physics - no need for anyon
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That's why I drew comparison to the moon landing. Because it was pointless. There was no commercial reason to go. No military reason to go. Minimal scientific reason to go. There was no reason at all, beyond raising the national middle finger at communism. And yet, we went anyway. That's the kind of reckless stupidity it would take to make manned space exploration or settling possible: Screw the rationality, we go because it's cool, and because we can't let the other superpower steal the prestige. It's happened once, so there is always the possibility it will happen again.
Sure if you disregard the Cold War, the thousands of warheads pointed at each other and the Cuban missile crisis then there was no military benefit. NASA was the velvet glove around the iron fist but I think everyone except you saw what the real message was: "Our rocket technology is so advanced, don't you f*cking try anything." The moon is of course of no military significance, but the Apollo program was.
The alternative would have been a military program under the DoD, but pushing those kinds of amounts in
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Re:oh wow (Score:5, Interesting)
I never said that it would help colonize the universe.
I expect that it'll be useful when that plastic tab on that rocker switch that's used all of the time breaks off, so they an print themselves a replacement instead of waiting weeks or months for a resupply mission to bring them one, or when an astronaut realizes that a particular control stick or other device is causing skin abrasions, so they could design and print a different one that doesn't cause sores, or any of a whole set of times when a spaceman needs some small, insignificant-on-earth part that is literally worth its weight in gold because they just don't have access to it.
I could even see circumstances in an Apollo-Thirteen kind of accident where engineers at NASA could come up with a fix that's safer and more reliable than duct-taping some plastic sheeting to a bulkhead because the tech to manufacture a few parts exists with those that need those parts.
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I could even see circumstances in an Apollo-Thirteen kind of accident where engineers at NASA could come up with a fix that's safer and more reliable than duct-taping some plastic sheeting to a bulkhead because the tech to manufacture a few parts exists with those that need those parts.
As opposed to use socks and duct tape? Philistine. I weep for the world that was.
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Yes, melting plastic in a closed environment. Brilliant. Instead of planning for their little hobby-jump in Low Earth Orbit, let's bring a cranky, tiny toy to make coat hangers... (in free-fall LOL). I just love the armchair engineers and programmers here going on about the 3D printer will be this tool to help colonize the universe..
It's baffling to me where this nonsense comes from. I'd expect that from eight year olds, not adults.
But then again, simple math and reality in the video game generation is too much to ask for, I guess.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the... [ucsd.edu]
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the... [ucsd.edu]
We don't even have the Concorde anymore, and you loons are talking about going outside the Solar System as if it's even remotely possible. The only propositions you have are decades-old fantasies.
Reality isn't going away. You're not going anywhere. Not you, not me, not your kids, not their kids, and not whatever will replace us in a hundred thousand years... Evolution is still happening, you know.
As opposed to the idiot who's pretty sure that the actual engineers and scientists involved in building the device, planning its mission and experiments on the ISS, and then putting it in an actual rocket and launching it into space...didn't consider all of this?
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Yes, melting plastic in a closed environment. Brilliant. Instead of planning for their little hobby-jump in Low Earth Orbit, let's bring a cranky, tiny toy to make coat hangers... (in free-fall LOL). I just love the armchair engineers and programmers here going on about the 3D printer will be this tool to help colonize the universe..
It's baffling to me where this nonsense comes from. I'd expect that from eight year olds, not adults.
But then again, simple math and reality in the video game generation is too much to ask for, I guess.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the... [ucsd.edu]
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the... [ucsd.edu]
We don't even have the Concorde anymore, and you loons are talking about going outside the Solar System as if it's even remotely possible. The only propositions you have are decades-old fantasies.
Reality isn't going away. You're not going anywhere. Not you, not me, not your kids, not their kids, and not whatever will replace us in a hundred thousand years... Evolution is still happening, you know.
As opposed to the idiot who's pretty sure that the actual engineers and scientists involved in building the device, planning its mission and experiments on the ISS, and then putting it in an actual rocket and launching it into space...didn't consider all of this?
The only consideration done is with respect to the budget. Usefulness or purpose? Nope, they just have to sell it.
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And there was me thinking the Harrier jump jet was invented in the U.K.
Some details about the 3D printer (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.space.com/27211-made-in-space-3d-printer.html/ [space.com]
It's ABS, and quite small. It's more for testing than anything else, but they say they intend to print functional items rather than just toys.
Re:Some details about the 3D printer (Score:5, Insightful)
3D printing is one of those things that will be pretty much essential for successful manned missions farther away than the moon.
Being unable to fix broken things will be fatal if the nearest spare parts are nine months away, and a 3D printer or two can, conceivably, replace a great many individual spare parts....
It's called redundancy (Score:3)
Redundancy, and 3D printers that can make all the parts for new 3D printers. Even if two of your three printers fail, use the third to build two more and hopefully the two that fail can be cannibalized for spare parts enough to build a complete working model.
Re:It's called redundancy (Score:4, Funny)
"Horses can make other horses. That's a trick that tractor's haven't figured out yet."
-- Heinlein
Re:It's called redundancy (Score:5, Insightful)
"Horses can make other horses. That's a trick that tractor's haven't figured out yet."
-- Heinlein
I doubt Heinlein put an apostrophe in tractors.
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Look's like apostrophe's figured out how to make other apostrophe's.
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Ever heard of RepRap?
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Wake me up when it prints the motors, belts, and electronics.
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The belts can be replaced with printed rack and pinion (probably herringbone too), the motors are being worked on (still slow and weak, but it's a start) and the electronics... I don't think so. [youtube.com]
Anyway there's still the bushings/linear bearings (I've seen PLA bushings), smooth rods, nuts and bolts, the hot end, etc.
I don't think RepRap will ever achieve 100% replicating ability, but the highest percentage they can reach, the better it is.
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For one thing, it doesn't have to support more then a fraction of it's weight against gravity. You could design a space printer that prioritized printable parts, so you only needed to take a much smaller supply of irreplaceable ones.
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When you hang yourself, please remember to do it over your compose pit, and to use the biodegradable rope so Mother Gaia will not be offended.
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Or build those parts to begin with. Especially when we start colonizing outside our solar system, being able to pack solid containers of materials as densely as possible and then building everything when we get there, is going to be critical to keeping weight down by nature of requiring less packaging. A big cube of metal is a lot cheaper to ship than several large metal machines.
Re:Some details about the 3D printer (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not an atheist, just practical. While I personally believe we'll get our acts together and get the technology to prevent most major extinction events before they happen (such as large asteroids, and even climate change), eventually our sun will expand and burn away all life on Earth. I see no reason why life on Earth should just accept its extinction lying down. There won't be any humans around, as we would recognize humans, but whatever our descendants look like, I'd like to hope they've gotten off the planet long before that happens, and brought along plenty of other Earthlings with them.
This century, we have the ability to get at least some of our eggs out of this one basket. Over the coming millennium, I expect we will be able to travel to other solar systems in generational ships. I happen to believe life is sacred. Shouldn't we try to preserve it for as long as we can?
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space mining appears to be the most viable way of acquiring some rare substances
Which ones, and do you have a cost analysis ?
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space mining appears to be the most viable way of acquiring some rare substances
Which ones, and do you have a cost analysis ?
The ones already in space that don't have to be drug out of a gravity well to be used in space.
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The other important fact about human colonization is that was never, at any time in history, an example of waiting until until all problems "at home" were fixed before jumping off and colonizing a new place. Corollary: there is also no instance of a person who advocated not attempting to achieve X until all current problems have been resolved either (1) solving all current problems or (2) achieving X.
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Crossing the ocean was a dangerous and hostile ordeal as well when we were first colonizing the New World.
Are you saying that it is actually impossible? I would suggest brushing up on Newton's First Law if you think so, and explaining how Voyager 1 is doing what it's doing.
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Crossing the ocean was a dangerous and hostile ordeal. On the other hand, once across the ocean, conditions were far more hospitable. Humans can generally live off the land if they have to, and build some sort of civilization.
Now, consider any place in the solar system outside Earth. There is no breathable atmosphere. Temperatures are way outside what is survivable. In most cases, there's no available water. In other words, there has to be complex life support apparatus, and this cannot be allowed
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Yes, I get it, space is like Heaven for atheists.
Ever since Muslims were banned from going to Mars by a fatwa? I guess it is!
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Ever since Muslims were banned from going to Mars by a fatwa? I guess it is!
Well, they're banned if the mission is one-way rather than two-way, mainly in response to that daft Mars One thing. Of course Islam doesn't have any central authority anyway so it's not like that "no suicide missions to Mars" fatwa is actually binding to anyone.
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Look, I get you have your rant-dial cranked all the way to 11, and maybe you haven't had a nutritious breakfast yet. So I'll ignore the strange hostility against humanity's general tendency to want to explore.
I'm curious why you think space colonisation is the domain of the atheist. I'm Catholic and I've dreamed of space since I was little. I have no means now but I would *absolutely* go into space as a t
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Here's a serious question. What is the point of launching a few people off into deep space if the Earth has been destroyed? It won't help the people left behind., and the Universe will get along just fine without humans.
What party did you not consider? The people who got off of Earth. It helps them quite a bit to not be dead.
Further, I think it would be of great comfort to the people about to die, that someone would survive and remember them. So I think a scheme to save some people by moving them off of Earth would help the ones who didn't get that chance.
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What's the point of restarting the human race? Like GP said, the universe will get along just fine without humans.
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What's the point of restarting the human race? Like GP said, the universe will get along just fine without humans.
So let me get this right, the universe will get along fine with humans and without humans. So therefore without humans is the obvious right choice?
I suppose that it doesn't matter to me whether or not you're surgically attached to a toilet bowl or not, so clearly that's an argument for the toilet bowl.
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Further, the argument I noted is terrible. I think it comes about fundamentally because the arguer has a de
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That's an act. The original AC is "Quantum Apostrophe" who has a thing against both space flight and 3-D printing. This story has both. Of course, he has heard and ignored a whole lot of similar arguments yet he still keeps trawling with the same arguments. You can tell he's in a thread when he's belittling people f
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Oh, individual humans, yeah, they're important. You shouldn't murder people.
But is humanity important? Is the last human alive ethically obligated to clone themselves to perpetuate the species? Or is it okay if, when they dies, humanity dies with them? That's the question I was trying to get at.
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Once 3D printing develops from it's current "stone knives and bearskins" stage of development and reaches the 21st century, sure. But even once the far off day arrives where we can print in a wide variety of materials (I.E. those suited to the task of the parts being replaced) and assuming it reaches the stage where the printed parts don't require substantial hand finishing for pr
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And after you do all of those things, sometimes something breaks that you don't have a spare for. And when the nearest replacement part is nine months away, you're screwed.
Being able to make spare parts is a GOOD thing. And the fewer thing
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Sure, there's that one-in-a-million chance. I never argued that point - only that you have no idea how the world works. And by insisting that we must take into account that one-in-a-million chance, I'd add the argument that you're resistant to any suggestion that you might know less than you do.
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That's why you carry spare parts with you.
Still, with mass at a premium it would be more efficient to send up a stockpile of raw plastic rather than many combinations of different spare parts. After all you can't perfectly predict which parts will fail and how often, so you could get caught short on a part that was supposed to be reliable but failed more than often it was predicted to.
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For the relatively small fraction of parts that will break that are printable plastics - that's a great thing. (At least with anything resembling current technology.) For everything else, especially the electronics parts that will represent the greatest proportion of the failures... not so much.
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You want a laser based 3D printer that fuses metallic dust rather than the plastic string melters.
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Why not functional items as well as toys, or, even better, functional items including toys?
These are people spending weeks to months, and sometimes even a whole year there. Surely they deserve some fun.
It's a "scaterometer" (Score:2)
I thought I knew my instruments, I never heard of such a thing. I thought the "scat" part was maybe an error, but it's not.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/f... [nasa.gov]
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Thanks for the link, I was curious about that, too. "RapidScat" sounds like what I do after chili night.
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Just calling it the RapidScatt would have prevented that unfortunate association... I got it wrong, it is called a scaterrometer, two r...
Any news on the first stage landing tests? (Score:3)
Re: Any news on the first stage landing tests? (Score:3)
Came here to ask the same. Somebody is patent-troll threatening them from testing landings on a barge offshore which was the sensible thing to do before actual land - for safety, not ease (waves). I'm planning to drive the family down for the first land landing, and it looks like imaginary -property knaves are doing their best to screw up this trip (and retard the progress of science and the useful arts, as usual).
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Why am I not surprised that it's Blue Origin (aka Jeff Bezos) who's trolling with a patent on vertical landing?
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I am not so worried about the patents. Vertically landing a rocket has been described in the TinTin comic ''Objectif Lune [wikipedia.org]...
I'm not a patent attorney either, but I'm fairly sure that works of fiction are not eligible to be considered prior works.
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Rumor is that the water bed could not be patented in the US because Heinlein had described it in detail in one of his stories (Stranger in a Strange Land?) If something has been adequately described in a publicly accessible document, it's not patentable, regardless of what the document actually is.
I rather suspect that the TinTin comic didn't describe vertical landings in sufficient detail to preclude patents. Remember that (at least theoretically) a patent does not cover an idea, but rather the implem
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This time, they launched without the landing legs [spaceflightnow.com], but since they are still testing above water that does not matter a lot. Deploying the legs and soft landing on water have been tried successfully already, so I imagine they could test other things like partially flying back to the launching site, fuel permitting. The twitters are silent, so far, however.
At the NASA pre-launch press conference [youtube.com], Hans Koenigsmann said that they would be doing the first boost back burn, as well as a re-entry and "landing" burn. At the SpaceX CRS-4 Post Launch Briefing [youtube.com] he said that it looked like all the burns wear successful, but they had to wait for the boat that collected telemetry to return.
I feel like I've seen some confirmation on good telemetry on twitter, but I can't find it now and this story is old enough that no one will likely see my post anyway...
Ames Research Center science payloads (Score:2)
Friday night at Ames Visitor Center (the big white tent just before main gate) had presentations by Ames project scientists on bioscience payloads, and had Q&A from audience. Also nice pamphlets and brochures for these programs were handed out (real cool to get hardcopy unlike typical webpage downloads). They intended to show launch on the big screen (NASA-TV) but it was scrubbed.
Ames student Fruit-Fly Experiment (AFEx)
Rodent Research-1 will examine how microgravity affects the rodents.
Seedling G
Well if SpaceX is so advanced... (Score:1)
...how come they store the maximum number of experiments in a CHAR?
Re: "without gravity"??? (Score:2)
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It's usually called microgravity, because there is a tiny, tiny bit - the ISS is low enough to interact with the atmosphere, and even outside of that there is always the tidal force. You'd just need very sensitive instruments to detect it.
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While yes, there is a gravity field nearby
There's a gravity field everywhere.