SpaceX Cargo Capsule Reaches International Space Station 89
Despite having some trouble with maneuvering thrusters a few days ago, SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule has successfully reached the International Space Station. from the article: "Astronauts aboard the outpost used the station's robotic arm to pluck the capsule from orbit at 5:31 a.m. EST as the ships sailed 250 miles over northern Ukraine. Flight controllers at NASA's Mission Control in Houston then stepped in to drive the capsule to its berthing port on the station's Harmony connecting node."
Congrats! (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice work ... (Score:2)
Re:Nice work ... (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_(spacecraft) [wikipedia.org]
Re:Nice work ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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it's like throwing away your semi-truck after every shipment.
Yeah... no.
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Re:Nice work ... (Score:4, Funny)
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polluted it with soup
Nothing a 10 dollar recipe book wouldn't fix...
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I've seen people in rural Alaska make houses from the containers that things come it. It's cheaper than paying to ship them back once delivered.
In most of the coastal USA you can get a container of varying description delivered for $2-5k, sometimes including long and tall refrigerated units. They might be even cheaper in Alaska, which has few exports that cannot be shipped by pipeline or jet stream. They're literally a problem at some ports.
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Well, they're probably pretty cheap any time the population isn't growing, but I only have specific knowledge of what it costs to get them delivered in nocal. They probably still cost money in the midwest, which still exports some stuff in them. They are probably damned near free in LA.
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Re:Nice work ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't understand all the throwaway freighters, it's like throwing away your semi-truck after every shipment.
Truckers would readily throw away their trucks on every voyage if it were insanely expensive and difficult to bring them back in any kind of functional condition.
And that's exactly why we use single-use rockets.
Re:Nice work ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Nice work ... (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's so insanely expensive and difficult, then why is SpaceX working on just that, a reusable rocket?
Because it's a worthwhile goal, which IMNSHO SpaceX is working on in the proper method: incrementally from simple, known-working parts.
That was the idea behind the shuttle. Didn't work out so well, but that was the idea.
Many at NASA in the 1970s should be flogged for over-promising and under-budgeting a single-stage-to-orbit "truck".
Re:Nice work ... (Score:5, Informative)
Many at NASA in the 1970s should be flogged for over-promising and under-budgeting a single-stage-to-orbit "truck".
Keep in mind that Congress and the Air Force were back seat designers on the Space Shuttle. It wasn't all NASA's fault.
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The problem is, re-usability is tough when you are dealing with the extreme requirements of space travel. Noone has proven it to be viable in cost yet, the shuttle shown it was possible though at a expensive cost. SpaceX is not reusable *yet* but their rocket is designed to be. Time will only tell if they succeed. Even Musk acknowledges that it may not be fully reusable (the difficulty of getting the 2nd stage rocket back) as Rocketry is HARD. But you gotta applaud them in their efforts and success will he
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Having said that, SpaceX *is* working on a rocket where the first stage is reusable. However, that is a few design generations away. They are currently working out the kinks on a test-bed rocket system called Grasshopper. Grasshoppe
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The SpaceX rocket is not reusable, nor is it designed to be.
You get your facts straight. Yes it was designed to be reusable, from the beginning.
The original plan was to put parachutes on the first stage and use a boat to recover it after ocean splashdown. SpaceX did in fact recover a first stage in service of that plan. There's pictures on the SpaceX site of the recovery operation. As it turns out, the impact of even a parachute landing does enough mechanical damage, coupled with the corrosive effects of seawater doing chemical damage, that the original reusabil
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In short, fuel. Slowing down first before reentering the atmosphere requires an enormous amount of fuel. Not as much as getting up there in the first place, but still so much that it's infeasible to take that much along with you into orbit. The mass of heat shielding to use for atmospheric braking is substantially less than the mass of fuel required for equivalent retro-rocket braking.
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gradually slowing down, and gradually reentering the atmosphere over the course of days instead of hours
That means the craft would be traveling through the atmosphere at 17,000 miles an hour for many, many hours. Even at high altitude, that speed causes ginormous friction.
Anyway, gravity is trying to accelerate the fall, so you'd need lots of fuel to retard the pull of gravity.
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If it's so insanely expensive and difficult, then why is SpaceX working on just that, a reusable rocket?
It'll be insanely difficult and expensive right up until SpaceX succeeds with soft-landing a first stage, at which point it will be routine and normal and why isn't everybody doing it?
But of course, we will first have to suffer through the clowns telling us how the first soft-landing was a failure because they had to make two tries to restart the engines after separation, so it landed with dry tanks instead of the 5% safety margin it was supposed to land with so it was a CATASTROPHIC FAILURE. Nevermind the
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it's like throwing away your semi-truck after every shipment.
I don't suppose that your semi-truck needs several months of extensive servicing, refurbishing, checking, and fixing the heat shield after every shipment.
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CRS may well be Orbital's only ambition in the cargo delivery sphere (normally they launch satellites), while we know for a fact that SpaceX has... other plans.
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Re:Nice work ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually TFA said "Dragon is the only station freighter that makes return trips", but that doesn't necessarily mean reusability.
The SpaceX site [spacex.com] claims it is reusable, but I don't know if it actually has been reused to date.
The last picture on the above linked page shows the condition of the returned vehicle. Its significantly crispy that it might be less expensive
to simply build a new one. Especially for manned missions coming later.
There is a comparison of cargo vehicle on Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_space_station_cargo_vehicles [wikipedia.org]
None mention re-useability explicitly.
Re:Nice work ... (Score:5, Informative)
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Either it will, and they'll keep doing it, or it won't, and they'll use the lessons learned from failing to save money in the next version. Either way, something good will happen.
Re:Nice work ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nice work ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The Dragon spacecraft/capsule is partially reusable. So far, the Falcon boosters are single-use. Space-X hopes to start recovering the first stage boosters, but that isn't working yet.
Meanwhile, they have 9 Merlin engines per Falcon first stage, one per second stage, and they're building about 400 per year. So they get manufacturing economies of scale. That's more valuable than reusability with heavy refurbishing, which tends to be a labor-intensive custom job. Refurbishing was the big cost problem with the US Space Shuttle - the amount of labor required for each turnaround was very high.
Re:Nice work ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The key to economic space flight is full and rapid reusability. Payload launchers need to become as reusable as passenger aeroplanes for space flight to become routine.
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Gaetano Morano, is that you?
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they're building about 400 per year.
Citation needed.
Re:Nice work ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The Dragon's are designed to be reused. However, if I recall correctly, NASA requested that SpaceX use a brand new capsule for each of the 12 scheduled delivery missions. This likely means that SpaceX is building up a stock of used Dragon capsules that can be repurposed to other missions at a reduced price.
If someone could confirm this, I would like to know if this is because NASA is stuck in the old ways of doing things with capsules, or if there is a legitimate safety/efficiency reason used Dragons could not be recycled for future supply missions.
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It's probably due to considerations for the safety of ISS. If a Dragon were to crack and explosively depressurize, the ISS would be lost.
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I wonder if NASA is actually trying to force them to build up a stock of capsules. If they started out by re-using them, there would probably be no stock available for emergencies.
Harbor pilot in space? (Score:2)
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Yeah, If I was sitting in the ISS, I'd want my guys in control too.
Still, you have to wonder who would be better at flying this thing, the guys who built and designed it, or guys from NASA?
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Still, you have to wonder who would be better at flying this thing, the guys who built and designed it, or guys from NASA?
That depends. Who's spent more time playing Lunar Lander?
Serious answer, though, the person with eyes on the item and who is right there with less chance of communication problem is the person who should be trained for the job and then do it.
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Outside of California you'd have Ivy league types figuring out ways to pay the engineers nothing while paying themselves close to 1000x the average engineer. Like it is done everywhere but in crazy CA.
Who's covering the story for NYT - Broder? (Score:4, Funny)
When he's done with the article, Dragon will have caromed off a couple comets, run out of fuel, and started floating backwards towards a black hole or something.
Potential set back for private space flight succes (Score:2)
Could you explain? (Score:4, Insightful)
SpaceX built and lauched the rocket into an initial orbit, had a problem with the capsule's booster's supply of propellant that they were able to fix, and delivered the capsule to the right point, orbiting alongside ISS within reach of it's Canadarm, a little later than originally scheduled.
In what way did SpaceX not succeed? And who, in your opinion, was the party who 'saved' this mission?
I agree that, while SpaceX is establishing a good record of recovering from issues, it would be better if they could develop a record of not having issues!
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Don't worry, it's just the man a.k.a. Gaetano Morano spewing his FUD. Nothing to see, move along. Even the grammar mistakes match with that G.M. persona.
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The next time you get into a car, if your brain is messed up somehow, might you crash into a school bus? If you crashed hard enough into the school bus, I don't know if the kids in the school bus could survive.
Yeah, makes just about as much sense as the parent.
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Progress M-34 undocked from Mir at 10:22:45 UTC on 24 June, in preparation for a docking test planned for the next day. On 25 June, the spacecraft re-approached Mir under manual control, in a test intended to establish whether Russia could reduce the cost of Progress missions by eliminating the Kurs automated docking system. At 09:18 UTC, whilst under the control of Vasily Tsibliyev, the Progress spacecraft collided with the space station's Spektr module, damaging both the module itself, and a solar panel.[4] Following the collision, Progress M-34 was manoeuvred away from the station, before being deorbited on 2 July.[6] Its deorbit burn was conducted at 05:34:58 UTC, with the spacecraft being destroyed during reentry over the Pacific Ocean at 06:31:50.[5]
Ho lee fook, that sounds like a Chernobyl type scenario all over again. Turn off automated safety systems for some sort of harebrained manual test and surprise surprise, they run into problems.
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that's why NASA requires approaching spacecraft to have triple-redundant thrusters. The Dragon capsule has FOUR sets... quadruple redundancy.
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