ISS Captures SpaceX Dragon Capsule 217
Today at 9:56AM EDT (13:56 GMT) the robotic arm on the International Space Station successfully captured SpaceX's Dragon capsule. It's the first time a commercial craft has connected with the ISS, and the first time a spacecraft made in the U.S. has gone to the station since the retirement of the shuttle. The approach was delayed temporarily as engineers worked out bad sensor readings due to light reflected off the ISS's Kibo laboratory. "To work around the problem, SpaceX narrowed the field of view for the laser sensor so that it wouldn't pick up light from the offending reflector. Dragon then returned to the 30-meter checkpoint and moved in for the final approach." If all goes well today, the capsule will most likely be opened tomorrow. Video of the operation is being broadcast live on NASA TV.
Hooray. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's it. Just hooray.
Re:Hooray. (Score:5, Insightful)
I will be mourning the death of publicly-funded space travel. Now, we hand it over to the pirates, slave-traders and privateers of our own era.
Citation please. Who has SpaceX robbed or committed violence against? Who has SpaceX enslaved? Which government has authorized SpaceX to attack foreign shipping during wartime?
Re:Hooray. (Score:5, Funny)
So, you're saying they're really good at covering it all up.
Re:Hooray. (Score:5, Funny)
They enslaved a whole race of people to build their space ship, and funded it by committing terrible acts of piracy on the high seas. The cannon balls whooshed over head and the pirates plundered everyone's sense of humor. It was terrible. A dark day for humanity and jokes.
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Re:Hooray. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Although I think the SLS would be an awesome rocket, I ain't holding my breath... we'll be lucky to see that thing fly by 2025, if ever. In the meantime, Falcon Heavy and others will already have captured the heavy lift market. So really, why bother?
Re:Hooray. (Score:4, Insightful)
NASA's goal is Mars. Too bad the politicians will never let them get there with a manned mission. They keep on cutting the budget unless the projects involved produce pork in key Congressional districts. They killed Ares and Constellation. They'll kill SLS once the Falcon Heavy/Dragon proves itself.
It can't be stressed enough that Boeing, Lockheed, et.al. aren't really aerospace companies anymore, they're funding sinks. The only reason they survive is government cost-plus contracts with built-in overruns to boost profits. They forgot how to deliver a space vehicle as a product if they ever knew how to begin with. SpaceX isn't selling NASA the vehicles, they're selling the lift capacity. How they generate said capacity isn't under NASA scrutiny other than safety concerns. Yes, they're using NASA launch facilities for the time being to send their rockets up, but expect that to change when the money starts coming in. And it will, now that they've demonstrated their capabilities. A lot of businesses who were holding back to wait and see will now start trickling forward to put their cash on the barrelhead for lift capacity. The glory days are just ahead.
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You should probably research the word privateer before using it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privateer [wikipedia.org]
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I will be mourning the death of publicly-funded space travel. Now, we hand it over to the pirates, slave-traders and privateers of our own era.
Citation please. Who has SpaceX robbed or committed violence against? Who has SpaceX enslaved? Which government has authorized SpaceX to attack foreign shipping during wartime?
Someone on the SpaceX team downloaded a couple of songs off TPB, so at least in the eyes of the RIAA they are bloodthirsty eyepatch-wearing, peg-legged pirates.
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I will mourn it the way I mourn the death of DARPANET several trillion private dollars of investment later.
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Learn the difference between figurative language and literal language.
The British empire handed over the duties of ocean exploration to private companies, who were more interested in making a buck (pound/guinea) than in serving the public interest. That they did serve the public interest was a secondary effect, but not the intended effect.
No doubt you've discovered that loyalty is no longer the currency of the realm...
Re:Hooray. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think that "robbing or committing violence" didn't come into it, try not paying your taxes and see what happens.
It's one thing to evade taxation which is used to pay for services that the people have voted for. It is quite another to evade taxation which is used to pay money to private corporations - whether that's Boeing or SpaceX.
So, do you think SpaceX isn't better than Boeing or even NASA developing things themselves? SpaceX does things about 10x cheaper than the others, so isn't 10% violence better than 100% violence? How about if SpaceX becomes like Greyhound and NASA goes away completely?
it doesn't mean it won't turn into another Boeing.
They have completely different goals. SpaceX intends to replace NASA. Boeing indend(ed) to suck at the NASA teet in perpetuity.
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So you say that the least fortunate don't deserve the strippers and the booze? How, how, how unthoughtful of you!
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the u.s. space program has always been in the hands of pirates, slave-traders, and privateers: their names are lockheed martin, boeing, northrop grumman etc. at least now spacex will operate a different model that doesn't include open-ended contracts inevitably milked for all their worth with convenient "cost overruns".
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I will be mourning the death of publicly-funded space travel. Now, we hand it over to the pirates, slave-traders and privateers of our own era.
That got modded insightful??? I judge from your signature you are Trolling but just in case...
The only way we will get in space big time is if there is profit to be made by being up there; Or are you saying you were rather humans were not in space?
Would you rather we stayed on this rock until the sun consumes us. If we do not push into space now, then when should we?
In anticipation of your next criticism I agree that at the moment investing in space is not the best survival tactic for the near future, Antar
Re:Hooray. (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way we will get in space big time is if there is profit to be made by being up there
Maybe we need to change this? It's a rather sad statement that profit trumps all and is the only valid motivation for expanding our horizons.
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I like your point, and yes I agree.
I've often argued that the most important thing humans can do is increase the quality of life. This neatly encompasses the pursuit of art, provides a basis for a moral code and improvements in technology. So by what you said then we should pursue things that make humaniity better just because they make things better. But how do you define better? Do I sleep better at night because Man has walked on the moon(yes). But how do you measure that and who do you trust to make tho
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I've often argued that the most important thing humans can do is increase the quality of life.
Yes, this is called "the profit motive" and it's a good thing. But you might be arguing that other humans should work hard to improve your quality of life, which I understand being pretty lazy myself, but should obviously be more greedy than the normal profit motive, no? Or maybe I misunderstood you.
There is plenty of privately-funded research (Score:3)
Maybe we need to change this? It's a rather sad statement that profit trumps all and is the only valid motivation for expanding our horizons.
Please remember that the profit motive includes charitable donations, such as the X prize and the Bigelow prize.
Between space tourism, commercial satellites, research performed by private universities and private companies, charitable donations, (in the future) space mining and (farther in the future) space colonisation, we have plenty of profit motive to fund space exploration.
Running a voluntary economy simply means that we respect people's property rights, instead of taking tax money from them by force a
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in the next billion years most of Earth will stay more hospitable than Antarctica
Actually, in mere tens of millions of years, plate tectonics will push the Antarctic continent into more temperate climes (I guess we'll have to rename it then) and I do believe that Australia is heading for the position currently held by Antarctica.
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If that's where it is going it is taking the long way round.
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> That got modded insightful???
You new to slashdot?
Re:Hooray. (Score:5, Interesting)
I will be mourning the death of publicly-funded space travel. Now, we hand it over to the pirates, slave-traders and privateers of our own era.
Uhm... I think you got that wrong. If anything it's the death of "publicly-unfunded" space travel... Because your precious PUBLIC funding is instead funnelling trillions into fighting unwinnable wars on intangible ideas, and trying to spend as little as they can get away with on space travel. It costs more to air-condition our troops than NASA's whole budget. Every time I hear about NASA funding being cut back, or some congress critters mandating purchasing & building around dated rocket tech to keep their lobbyist friends' business afloat I died a little. Now there seems to be a light flickering on at the end of the tunnel.
OPTIONS are good, people. It's not the death of anything in all actuality. NASA's not decommissioned, it's not like they've even stopped rocket research; It's just that we have MORE OPTIONS other than a bureaucracy driven platform held back by the opinions of the ignorant masses...
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U-rah.
And hooray, indeed, to SpaceX.
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Hey,we're (a form of) a demcracy, so we fund what most people value, not what you value. And what most people value is a check form the government! The defense budget surely dwarfs NASA's budget, but is in turn dwarfed by the "checks from the government" budget.
Very roughly, "checks from the government" (money given to the old and poor, but mostly the old, who on average ar emore wealthy than the poeple paying into the system) is 100% of federal revenue, defense is about 30%, interest on the debt is 10%, a
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There's plenty of commercial entities that receive huge gobs of money from the government - especially if it's an enterprise that will likely have a lot of public benefit like power plants, telcom fiber, etc.
Re:Hooray. (Score:4, Informative)
SpaceX started the Dragon capsule development independent of any contract by NASA, and they flew the first two flights of the Falcon 9 without any government money being spent at all (except for some range protection at the space port... like happens at any airport around the world). I don't know what your problem is here, but the money coming from the government is not the only reason this is being done.
If it is raining money, you take out a bucket and pick some up. Compared to the over $10 billion that has already been spent toward the Constellation/SLS program and projected $10 billion+ more that they are expecting to spend before something even goes up into the air (2017 at the earliest), is a few hundred million dollars spent on a successful flight to the ISS that is happening now instead of later a waste of money? Had the Ares I funding continued like all of the supporters of Constellation claimed it would do, even with completion of deadlines that were claimed (and never met BTW), it still wouldn't be flying right now and also would have chewed through billions of dollars by now for a rocket that would do even less than the Falcon 9 + Dragon.
The $1.6 billion for the COTS contract is for 12 flights to the ISS. The money is being put in at the front perhaps with milestones completed, but these are chartered flights just like happens when the U.S. military charters commercial airlines to fly military personnel around the world. Contrast that to a cost-plus contract where there is no upper limit that will be spent by the government and any costs (and financial risks) are carried by the government, not the company doing the flight. That is the big difference here.
Re:Hooray. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the difference between:
NASA: We want a shuttle
Boeing/etc: Right give us $5billion and we'll go build one for you.,
NASA: Here's $5 Billion
BOeing./etc: Thanks but we had need some more
NASA: okay
Boeing/etc: Nope still more and if you don't give it to uss you'll have wasted all the moey you threw at us
NASA: okay, well while you're doing that we need to change the requirements
Boeing/etc: Oh, few more billion please, and did i mention it doesn't work very well so we'll want a few more billion.
etc
verses
SpaceX: we want to develop manned flight, look here's us launching a satellite. Anyone interested?
NASA: cool, hey we want that, need some funding?
SpaceX: Sure if you're offering it to us.
NASA okay, well if you can deliver a Falcon 9 and meet the design targets for your Dragon we'll give you $500 Million to build them
SpaceX: Done, can we have our money now?
NASA: Cool you've had a successful launch. We'll pay you for the next launch now then
If you don't see the difference between these two models then I'm somewhat worried. Not that I blame NASA or Boeing or anyone else, it's just what happens when this much money is in play. the only way to fix that is to get the cost down.
If anything this distraction of manned flight has taken them away from their initial goal of developing cheap satellite launch capability. Not that I think they mind but still it shows that they had a business plan without NASa that still exists. See Biglow as well for uses of this manned capability they plan to use.
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While that is true to an extent, I don't think it fair to completely ignore how much money/effort/engineering went into developing the technology to even have a space program. Like how it was back in the 50's and 60's, entire fields of engineering, chemistry, lots of money needed to be invested without any clear expectation of profit.
Now, ~60 years later, a private company can come along and launch a rocket, but they also had 60+ more years of advancements to utilize.
Still, SpaceX's achivement is very impre
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The achievement isn't that a private company can come along and launch it - that's been true for a while now, it's just that no-one could be bothered.
The real achievement here is the operational cost per launch (note, this does not include R&D costs, so the argument for "how much money went into developing" does not apply).
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Actually, I think it was Rockwell...
I remember watching "60 Minutes" years and years ago and they did a report on the cost of the Shuttle. One interesting thing was that since the Shuttle was a "cost plus" contract (ie, we'll pay you how much it cost plus some more money), any other project that was not a "cost plus" project (at the time, building F-16s for the Air Force) that had some kind of overrun was just transferred to the Shuttle contract.
Rockwell also assisted in the James Bond picture, Moonraker [imdb.com],
need some space Chinamen to build a space railroad (Score:2, Funny)
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I can see it now, white guys spend all their time doing finance stuff, Chinese spend their time doing technical stuff.
Oops, and here I was coding a student records system. My bad, I'll go find something financey to do, I guess.
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Being able to commandeer and board somebody else's spaceship will be a tremendous feat of engineering. If a little rape and pillaging is the motivation someone needs to solve that problem, I think I might actually be okay with that. :)
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Am I the only one who saw the comment about space pirates and thought, "awesome!"?
For the sake of humanity (Score:2)
I hope you're joking.
I missed the live video (Score:2)
Can someone please post a recording of the approach and capture?
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They're still in the process of docking it (watching the live feed now).
Re:I missed the live video (Score:5, Informative)
Here you go:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzZvyrrpZ88 [youtube.com]
Smaug? (Score:5, Funny)
It's been a long road, getting from there to here: (Score:4)
Today ISS (Score:2)
Today the ISS, tomorrow LV-426! ;) Gratz to SpaceX and the ISS crew.
sorry, unconstructive emotional comment'n'all, but (Score:5, Insightful)
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no (Score:2)
that comment correctly refers to the first porn they film in space, which hasn't happened yet, but will soon because some doofus just raised $40 million for the endeavour on kickstarter
priorities
Re:sorry, unconstructive emotional comment'n'all, (Score:5, Informative)
There is a reason every time something cool is done it's done in America first
First train? English.
First commercial train service? Manchester to Liverpool.
First car? German.
First TV? Invented by a Scotsman.
First TV broadcast service? English.
First freeway/motorway/autobahn? German.
First satellite? Russian.
First man in space? Russian.
First man to orbit the Earth? Russian.
First woman in space? Russian.
First moon rover? Russian.
First space walk? Russian.
First space station? Russian. (The ISS has a Salyut-derived core)
First probe to land on another planet? Russian.
Countless records broken for long duration stays in orbit? Russian.
Inventor of the jet engine? English.
Home of first electronic computer? Manchester, England.
First supersonic airliner? Anglo-French.
Inventor of the World Wide Web? An Englishman working in Switzerland.
That Kibo, still making trouble... (Score:5, Funny)
Congratulations to SpaceX (Score:5, Informative)
Everyone should be proud that their dream has come true.
Thank you for your hard work in providing a new capability for space flight.
myke
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Congratulations indeed on passing such a major test of the systems that we've been hearing about for so long! :D
Finally the private sector is allowed to take over (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Finally the private sector is allowed to take o (Score:4, Insightful)
Profit has always been a motive. Unfortunately, the big aerospace contractors made a profit whether or not they actually did what they were contracted to do. Now companies like SpaceX will profit for actually getting things done, which, as you say, should move things along in the right direction.
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So, how have the big traditional space contractors like the Rockwell, Boeing, Lockheed, etc., of old, and now United Space Alliance and United Launch Alliance not delivered on their contracts? Saying that it might cost too much by some measure is one thing, but in terms of space launch to LEO you don't get a better record than ULA [youtube.com]. Note, too, that SpaceX is using a significant amount of government infrastructure and personnel to launch and manage its space systems — not to diminish what they're doing
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It's not that they didn't (eventually) deliver. It's that those were done on a cost + basis of if we keep throwing money at it, eventually we'll get it done.
I believe SpaceX is working under a different model. NASA has said "if you can achieve this, we'll pay you $x for each of this many trips". So the costing is fi
Its not just "Private Good - Government Bad" (Score:5, Insightful)
The strive for profit will necessarily lead to advancements in space tech, as they have in all other industries where long-term profitability is the primary incentive (Silicon Valley being the prime modern example).
SpaceX, Virgin Galactic et. al. aren't going into space because they are private sector.
SpaceX, Virgin Galactic et. al. are going into space because they are run by individuals who have made shedloads of money in other ventures and, instead of being good capitalists and starting work on their next shedload, have decided instead to try and realise their childhood ambition of being an astronaut, if only vicariously (has Elon Musk been sighted since the launch? :-) )
Kudos to them of course - and they may even end up making money - but without that sort of motivation the private sector would, at most, look at ways of making a risk-free buck by launching comms satellites rather than trying to put people into space.
As others have pointed out, the real test will - unfortunately - come the first time someone gets killed. I'm not sure the private sector could afford a Challenger inquiry.
Re:Its not just "Private Good - Government Bad" (Score:5, Interesting)
the real test will - unfortunately - come the first time someone gets killed. I'm not sure the private sector could afford a Challenger inquiry.
I hadn't thought of that. Thanks for spoiling my morning :-(
Seriously how did we survive these things in the past, how did we react the first time an airplane killed someone or when the first time a gas light exploded. Why are we so different now?
Are we different now because we can and should know better that these designs have flaws? Would the challenger disaster have been worse if the design had found to not be faulty, or would the public outcry have been worse if the collective result was "Nope we did the best we could, damnded if we know why that went wrong" instead of known flawed design + management overide + unfortunate conditions.
Maybe they'll be lucky and it will live up to its projections of 1/1000 failures and it will take 3000 launches for the statistics to catch up with them. Maybe something as simple as luck in the nascent stages of space flight makes the differences between the civilisations that colonise their galaxies and those that don't. Maybe that;s another variable in the drake equation?
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Kudos to them of course - and they may even end up making money - but without that sort of motivation the private sector would, at most, look at ways of making a risk-free buck by launching comms satellites rather than trying to put people into space.
I don't know whether it's true, but I've read that SpaceX is already profitable. And they have a ton of comm sats lined up on the launch manifest on their web site.
Putting people into space is a much bigger market in the long term.
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the real test will - unfortunately - come the first time someone gets killed. I'm not sure the private sector could afford a Challenger inquiry.
Would there be one?
"Here's the release statement, signed in blood. Sorry for your loss ma'am."
"Sorry about your billion dollar satellite we chucked into the ocean. Want a coupon for 10% off your next 5 space launches?"
"Yo, congressional investigators, we don't technically work for you, so kindly GTFO, we've got rockets to launch."
That's part of the package deal that comes with the private industry. Corporations screwing you over is just part of the game. Sure, NASA will be investigated for pissing awa
Re:Finally the private sector is allowed to take o (Score:5, Informative)
No it wasn't run by NASA... NASA was the customer and gave a list of conditions to be met... However it was ran by Space X and not NASA
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By banning satellite launches on anything but the shuttle to increase the fly rate of the shuttle to meet their projections.
By the legal requirements a private company had to meet to launch (that were impossible to meet) that were waived on a NASA launch.
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You may want to check out [orbital.com] Orbital Sciences Corporation [orbital.com] (OSC [wikipedia.org]).
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You do realize that if it wasn't for a government endeavour, there would be no space station for the dragon capsule to dock with?
Until it starts flying to Bigelow's space stations.
Its not a commercial craft (Score:4, Insightful)
If the money that's paying for it is coming from taxes, its not commercial.
NASA hardware has always been built primarily by private companies like Lockheed Martin.
In Washington jargon, when you give money to contractors instead of federal employees, its "commercial" or "free enterprise", so they can pretend to be in favor of freedom and against government. But one of the main reasons for it is its a way of evading controls on executive salaries. There's a revolving door where government program managers funnel lucrative contracts to private companies with ridiculously high overhead rates, then afterwards go to work at those companies. Its common to already have a hiring agreement with the company before awarding the contract.
I'm not suggesting what the situation is with SpaceX, I'm just commenting on "commercial" space development in general. Its commercial if its commercial activity, such as space tourism or putting up satellites that private companies pay for. Otherwise its double-speak.
In any case, congrats on the engineering achievement, I don't mean to detract from that.
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There have been articles on how space travel is now sustainable but the sole customer here is the government and this is no more sustainable than all those solar companies that were making billions just a few years ago but are now teetering on the verge of bankruptcy now that gov't subsidies have evaporated (First Solar for example has gone from being a $15B+ to being a $1B+ company in 1 year).
I think this is a great achievement but let's not fool ourselves, this is not a private venture that's sustainab
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Umm, no.
Trips to ISS, the sole customer is the government.
Alas, trips to the ISS aren't all there is. SpaceX has contracts for launch of several commsats already, which are generally paid for by private corporations.
Plus foreign governments and companies, of course.
So, no, SpaceX isn't a company with one customer.
Privately funded (Score:5, Interesting)
If the money that's paying for it is coming from taxes, its not commercial.
You are correct in a sense. The current primary customer (NASA) happens to be a government agency and that agency does pay with tax dollars. Saying it is commercial is very much a short hand for a more complicated story. SpaceX also already has contracts with private sector companies as well. Furthermore its operations and R&D were funded privately initially to the tune of something like $400 million. Funding from NASA has come from progress payments on launch contracts. The fact that NASA is a government agency is somewhat incidental to the operations of SpaceX. Our company has had the government as a customer (we've sent products into space) in the past but that doesn't mean we aren't a private company or that what we do isn't commercial.
Re:Its not a commercial craft (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not suggesting what the situation is with SpaceX
What does your subject line mean then?
If NASA buys toilet paper from a commercial vendor, that doesn't turn the toilet paper manufacturer into a government boondoggle.
SpaceX is commercial in the sense that they offer a product for a price. When you have government contractors who charge "some base amount plus whatever else cost overruns demand the price to increase to" then, yeah, it's a quasi-government entity. SpaceX will eat cost overruns, if they happen, but that's bad for profitability so they try to ensure it doesn't (with good engineering and business acumen). That isn't to say that fleecing government agencies doesn't show good business acumen, but it's also not a private sector endeavour.
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I'm not suggesting that its a boondoggle. I'm suggesting that the use of the word "commercial" is misleading.
Government contracts I have worked on never went over budget, the contract size was fixed from the outset. But it was still mostly a matter of semantics and accounting that we were private and not government employees.
Lockheed Martin is a private company that has private customers besides the government. When the name NASA went on their products, this was political as much as anything. So why don
However it is not government (Score:3)
I don't think it is fair to classify them based on who is paying for the ride.
Lockheed Martin never had a goal of standing on their own, they always relied on the government to pick up the tab.Space X seems to be going from the direction of "We take the risk" more so than true defense contractors.
Space X also can provide services to other commercial and national interests. They certainly do not have the cost structure the truly government funded launches used.
Re:Its not a commercial craft (Score:5, Informative)
Commercial versus non-commercial is about a company building a standard product which the government utilizes through firm fixed price contracts. SpaceX has a published price for a launch, and that's exactly what they charge. In contrast the traditional NASA approach has been to award cost plus contracts to major contractors and an army of subcontractors and NASA is more of a partner than a customer, building a one-off custom design. In this type of system cost overruns often get billed to the customer (NASA), but with firm fixed price the work is expected to be completed for the agreed upon price and SpaceX has stated that any cost overruns on their NASA programs above the fixed price launch costs will be covered by SpaceX, not NASA.
Contract vehicles notwithstanding, it also appears that even in NASA's opinion SpaceX is simply more efficient at getting things done than the usual NASA & defense contractor method probably due to reduced management and organizational overhead: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/586023main_8-3-11_NAFCOM.pdf [nasa.gov]
A big part of SpaceX's efficiency is that they are vertically integrated, doing most of the work themselves. With the non-commercial cost-plus model Congress had the ability to split up subcontracts for the shuttle development and manufacturing across the entire nation, with drastic hits to efficiency.
Although it may not seem like a totally commercial enterprise with NASA as the major source of SpaceX's revenue (for now), but there are important changes taking place in how NASA is acquiring launch capacity which seem like they have the capability to reduce costs over the past model
Actually, this is much different (Score:3)
From a comment in latimes:
From the comments, a lot of people have been wondering exactly what "private" means here. With most "non-private" NASA contracts, NASA has direct control over the overall design of the vehicle and uses cost-plus contracts with companies (with massive amounts of red tape) to actually build it; cost-effectiveness is actually undesirable for contractors under those contracts since it means they get less money and there's a strong desire to funnel out work to politically-important congressional districts to maintain political support when cost overruns occur. In this new "private" paradigm NASA pays fixed-cost for the cargo delivered and it's up to the company to determine the best way to meet those goals, and the company is also permitted to commercially sell their services to other customers. It sounds like a small difference to some, but as we've seen it ends up being a one or two orders-of-magnitude more cost-effective for the taxpayer.
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So, let me know if i get this right...
Any airline that operates charter plane services to the government isn't a commercial entity?
Any freight company that ships equipment for the government isn't a commercial entity?
Any paper company that sells supplies to the government isn't a commercial entity?
You are missing the main difference between the contract SpaceX is operating under compared to Boeing, Lockheed, etc.
SLS is a fully funded government rocket whose design, construction and operation is at
Will they have to use The Arm in the future? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is using the robotic arm the only way the Dragon spacecraft will be allowed to dock with the ISS? It seems to be cumbersome and to take a long time.
Or is this only being done now for safety reasons and, with more experience, a direct approach and docking will be allowed?
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Yes, this is the only way to dock the Dragon, as well as the Japanese HTV [wikipedia.org] and the upcoming Cygnus [wikipedia.org] spacecrafts.
The European ATV and the Russian Soyuz and Progress spacecrafts use an automatic docking system. The Shuttle used to dock manually but without the use of the robotic arm.
Re:Will they have to use The Arm in the future? (Score:4, Informative)
berthing is *harder* than docking. they are doing it this way because it is a cargo transport, and the berthing ports are much larger than the docking ports.
if/when Dragon starts carrying people, it will dock.
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berthing is *harder* than docking.
The failed Soyuz docking attempts of the past, including a collision with Mir which caused substantial damage to the space station, would like to disagree with you.
Grabbing it with the robot arm and attaching it to the docking port has to be substantially easier than building a robust and reliable automatic docking system or docking it manually under remote control.
Mixed blessings (Score:5, Interesting)
(Disclaimer: I work in aerospace)
Private sector space exploration is a mixed blessing without regulatory oversight.
The FAA does wonders for ensuring consistent manufacturing and engineering policies, as do the various ISO industrial process certification programs for industrial centers.
Government sponsored engineering tends to be a total money and resource sink, and what comes out tends to look like the engineers went out of their way to make things needlessly cryptic and arcane to justify their bills.
Essentially, the equivalent of a 500 line "hello world!", which ignores normal OS window classes, allocates and frees its own memory, and has an integrated kernel runtime to make sure nobody is snooping on the secret sauce from outside of userspace.
Private designs tend to shy away from uniqueness, and toward stringent use of the KISS principle, but may excessively use protected engineering documentation and practices. (Imagine somebody writing their own application API on top of the perfectly functional standard one for their target, and locking that bitch down so tight that its like watching a snuff film, then using it religiously to keep people from "copying" their ideas. Nevermind that all their competitors are also working from the KISS handbook on the actual engineering, and that the differences are all almost entirely process related. Fit form and function is conserved.)
Oversight helps to keep these proprietary engineering toolbases under control, and helps ensure interoperability of critical systems, like runway boarding ramps on the aircraft's skin, type of fuel used, and standard cabin pressures.
Without the unifying influence of such oversight, no airplane in the sky would follow any standards except internal OEM ones. An airbus and a boeing offering would not use the same cabin pressure (just to throw something out there), because one of them would get the brightt idea to lower it 5psi so they could fly a little higher and reduce skin stresses as a competative edge.
Space vehicles, being radically new to private industry, would be especially vulnerable to marketing and PR drones dictating on the engineering so that the vehicle stands out from the crowd, even though that is a terrible thing for interoperability.
So, while I like the leaner design implementations that come out of private companies, I strongly advocate oversight and regulatory compliance for safety and interoperability reasons.
Otherwise the specs on a private spaceship will be a countless mess of cross-referencing NDA laden proprietary internal standards docs, and as an engineer for a company that does outsourced work from the big boys, I only have so much goddam space on my desk for binders full of proprietary specifications so I can read somebody's engineering properly. "Torque bolts to LES####" is fine and dandy if you work for learjet. For the rest of us, I'm happy to get an AME or NAS number that I can look up instead of calling your support line, talking with a string of bobbleheads behind desks who are more concerned over weather or not I might discuss what's in a spec for tightening bolts with "unauthorized" people, and if I am indeed authorized to know the secret of the bolt tightening in the first place. I'm an engineer. Just give me the damn spec, your corporate crap smells up my day.
Regulatory oversight makes things magically simpler, because it forces LES#### to be compliant with a standard AMS#### or similar regulatory body that I don't have to suck a dick to get my hands on.
I'm thrilled that the dragon heavy lifter works. It opens all sorts of doors for much cheaper orbital deployments, and the soyouz capsules were starting to have unreliable failure rates from excessive use and improper maintenance downtimes. This will work wonders.
But for FSM's sake, institute some damned industry regulations!
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Private sector space exploration is a mixed blessing without regulatory oversight
People that think like you are exactly the reason government contracts are so expensive. The "oversight" you speech of is having more managers and people with MBAs. The "oversight" that don't really know much of anything and add 20-50% cost overhead to any project. The "oversight" adds no real value what so ever because they are NOT QUALIFIED to provide oversight. Remember the "oversight" was exactly the reason for the Columbia disaster , the manager types/overhead o
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Agreed, oversight is also a mixed bag. And yes, I despise MBAs. They are the fuckers making the byzantine 3 ring circus I have to deal with to get a specification for a fucking hydraulic port, or some similar crap.
However, things like the ASME, while I curse that they demand money out of me and don't keep good records of purchases, are a fantastic thing for standardization otherwise.
The initial private craft design specs that spacex and co. Develop are de-facto standards, rather than broadly designed stand
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Re:Mixed blessings (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed, but NASA is well justified in their paranoia, until a less partial regulatory body steps in.
If there is one thing abundantly clear about this century's history, you simply can't trust industry to be self-regulating.
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The FAA Office of Commercial Space (AST, don't ask me how the acronym and the name line up...) is attempting to do just that.
Its really a quite nice arrangement, because the FAA has been working on this since when the concept of private space flight had an extremely large 'giggle factor', and they have been working back and forth with the commercial providers to ensure that the regulations make sense and won't be too restrictive, while still maintaining safety.
Plus everyone I've met from AST has been really
Am I the only one . . . (Score:5, Funny)
. . . who hopes that there's an inflatable, spring-loaded Xenomorph puppet poised behind the capsule's hatch?
"Heh - heh. You'll find a complimentary set of new underwear for the crew in Bin 13."
Re:TV (Score:5, Informative)
If you point your FTA dish at the ISS and can track it you can watch the real feed. If your FTA receiver can do all the different broadcast file types.
I am controlling the FTA dish with my Ham radio tracker (Alt-Az FTW bitches) and use it to view.
Problem is I only can watch when they pass in a visible window :-( Dang you line of sight and physics!
Otherwise point your FTA setup at AMC18 at 105.0deg W. Transponders 39 to 41.
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Boo, you should be hand-pointing a crossed-yagi at it :P
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After a few beers. Naked, in the moonlight.
Re:Tractor Beam (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Tractor Beam (Score:4, Informative)
If it were me, I would just use the tractor beam and pull it into the hangar.
We haven't invented tractor beams yet and they don't have a hangar. Any other bright ideas, captain? No, we can't even go to warp to get any, and the Vulcans are not watching.
As for SpaceX & Dragon && ISS, seriously cool. Keep it up. :-) I for one am cheering for you.
Re:Tractor Beam (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is Sci-Fi in some regards had made the impossible/impractical come seem like the norm... This is why we put way too much time and money into the shuttle program, We wanted a "reusable" spacecraft like we see in Sci-Fi. Even though it is cheaper per flight to make disposable space craft. But we spent decades on the idea of the Reusable Space craft. I wonder how much further ahead we would be if we focused on the disposable craft.
For one every launch there will be improvements to the craft, because they can. Second you would get a new fresh group of people making crafts all the time so the knowledge and experience is passed to each generation. Third we would have crafts specialized for each mission, the shuttle is a general purpose device... Thus not really fit for any mission.
Re:Tractor Beam (Score:4, Informative)
The primary problem with the shuttle wasn't that it was reusable.
1) The shuttle was built to handle both lots of cargo and humans. That meant that it had to have the reliablity of a man-rated craft with the lifting capacity of a heavy lifter.
2) Not enough funding for a fullly reusable shuttle. Early plans involved a fully reusable shuttle. The shuttle as designed instead was a hybrid which in many respects combined the worst of both reuable and disposable spacecraft.
2) Two much flexibility in orbital parameters was insisted on. This is frequently not appreciated as a serious problem. The US military insisted that the shuttle be able to take off from a variety of other locations including Vandenberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandenberg_AFB_Space_Launch_Complex_6 [wikipedia.org]. They wanted it to be able to launch into a near polar orbit, send out a satellite and land all in a single orbit of the Earth. This was so that if things ever got hot with the USSR we could launch additional spy satellites faster than the Soviets could shoot them down, or could launch single use spy satellites for other purposes . This article http://www.space.com/1438-chapter-opens-space-shuttle-born-compromise.html [space.com] discusses this in detail. There are also other requirements that the military had but it seems that the details remain classified, and it is possible that the public orbital parameters as required by the military were covers for other orbits. But the requirement that the shuttle be able to do absolutely every low Earth orbit that every civilian or military source could possibly want severely constricted the shuttle design in many ways that were never used or infrequently used.
There's another thing to remember though: the shuttle was the world's first reusable craft whereas there have been a lot of single-use craft. The first model of something will often have more problems. We shouldn't take the problems with the shuttle and make a blanket assumption that reusable craft can't be done efficiently.
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The funny thing is the Dragon is MORE reusable than the shuttle was. The shuttle's big external tank was not reused.
This is just from a little searching online, but it appear that on the dragon all but the trunk behind the top capsule are reused. The two lower stages and the top capsule are intended to eventually do fancy vertical landings on actual landing pads. No fleet of recovery ships pulling crap out of the ocean needed. That's pretty awesome.
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No, the problem with Shuttle was that we built four, then stopped.
The whole point of reusability was to get economies of scale - open a Shuttle assembly line, build a couple-three every year, streamline the process of getting them ready for space, and launch weekly.
Or Daily.
Of course, the fact that we then, af
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"tractor beam", yeah, no. You can push stuff with a beam fairly simply... pulling is just ridiculous. The only switchable macro scale pulling forces that we can create are EM fields... not beams. EM fields can bend light, or tug on objects -- or repel objects if you use eddy currents -- you know, like what the aluminum can recycling systems use. Photon beams can push things too.
You keep on with your "tractor beams", as us Romulans just laugh: "Look at the apes trying to push a rope!"
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And the few that caught the dragon were reported to be delicious with ketchup.
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Look, Canada. You make a good robot arm, OK? Nice job, well done. We won't forget it it's your arm, hell, you put your flag all over it. We're impressed, it's a heck of a piece of hardware.
I swear, talking with Canadians about space exploration is like dealing with an insecure kid brother. "Happy mother's day, Mom, we all made you breakfast." "And I made the orange juice, Mom! Isn't it great orange juice? Make sure you try the orange juice, Mom! The orange juice is the most important part of break