Dragon Capsule Heads Home From ISS 70
An Anonymous Coward sent word that the SpaceX Dragon capsule is heading home from the International Space Station. From the article: "The unmanned Dragon space capsule set off from the International Space Station Sunday for the cargo-laden return trip to Earth after successfully delivering its first commercial payload, NASA said.
Using a robotic arm, an astronaut aboard the floating laboratory detached and released the capsule at 1329 GMT after an 18-day mission to resupply the space station, the first ever by a privately-owned company, SpaceX.
The next step will be to bring the capsule out of orbit by intermittently firing its onboard engines to slow its speed.
It is then supposed to parachute into the Pacific Ocean off the California coast at 1920 GMT."
Follow the descent online (Score:5, Informative)
Space X is posting updates here: http://www.spacex.com/webcast/ [spacex.com] , unfortunately there is no live video feed, only status updates.
It landed already. (Score:5, Informative)
Re: loss of focus (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, curiosity was cool, but it wasn't new. It wasn't groundbreaking research and technology.
Unlike Beagle 2? (I'm British so maybe I'm allowed to joke about this!)
If you are not inspired by spacecraft currently exploring Mercury [wikipedia.org], Mars [wikipedia.org], and Saturn [wikipedia.org], and spacecraft on the way to Pluto [wikipedia.org], Ceres [wikipedia.org] and Jupiter [wikipedia.org], then you may be an expensive person to please.