SpaceX Successfully Delivers Supplies To ISS 87
Reuters reports on the successful SpaceX-carried resupply mission to the ISS: "A cargo ship owned by Space Exploration Technologies arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, with a delivery of supplies and science experiments for the crew and a pair of legs for the experimental humanoid robot aboard that one day may be used in a spacewalk. Station commander Koichi Wakata used the outpost's 58-foot (18-meter) robotic crane to snare the Dragon capsule from orbit at 7:14 a.m. (1114 GMT), ending its 36-hour journey. ... "The Easter Dragon is knocking at the door," astronaut Randy Bresnik radioed to the crew from Mission Control in Houston. Space Exploration, known as SpaceX, had planned to launch its Dragon cargo ship in March, but was delayed by technical problems, including a two-week hold to replace a damaged U.S. Air Force radar tracking system."
SpaceX - Mother of Dragons (Score:4, Funny)
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Sorry to be raining on your leftard parade, but this is the work of private initiative, not state.
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Gee, maybe the agency that needed it's services and couldn't do it itself?
Re:yayy!!! Cheer our corporate fascist state! (Score:4, Insightful)
Corporations and government combined is the definition of fascism according to Mussolini.
Since when did Mussolini have a valid opinion on anything? He was spouting propaganda, not delivering a scientific argument. As for writing a check to Elon Musk: are you implying that any government buying a service from a private company is a fascist state? Because I don't think you and I have the same definition of fascism in that case.
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Mod parent up!
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Mussolini created modern fascism, but his definition was both stupid and misleading. First, in any modern state government will always be intertwined with corporations because the state is the executive committee of the biggest corporations. That's not fascism, that's just capitalism working as intended. It becomes fascism when it removes all opposition, eliminating them first from the streets and then physically. And even then there are a few distinctions between just murderously oppressive states and fasc
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Fascism, from my understanding, originally meant a system where the government contr
Odd (Score:3)
You scream about the profits on this, and yet, $/KG is less than what Russia, OSC, Shuttle, SLS, Atlas, Delta, Ariane 5, China, etc would charge. IOW, this is working the way it is supposed to by lowering the costs of space travel.
So, what do you neo-cons/tea* types have against private space? Seriously.
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Corporations being in the government is fascism. A government buying things from a corporation is just business as usual. Or do you think it's a sign of creeping nazism that the government doesn't fuel its fire trucks exclusively from government-owned refineries?
And, frankly, we should all be happy that space flight is starting to de-orbit from heights of expense only a government can afford and enter the sphere of
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Look, if there was no profit, he wouldn't do it.
Think of it like this:
Possible outcomes assuming no profit: Elon looks at the deal, and the possible outcomes are: #1SpaceX is wildly successful, and breaks even. SpaceX is wildly successful and loses money because of unforeseen costs. SpaceX fails, and Elon loses most of his wealth. SpaceX succeeds but doesn't run a surplus/profit, can't set anything aside, and years down the road, a launch fails and there is no reserve funds to get them through the hard time
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So instead of just doing it themselves they write a check to Elon Musk to do it who then pockets a sizable chunk of your tax dollars as profit.
The cargo is going to the ISS anyway. Instead it could have been put onboard an unmanned version of the Orion spacecraft that U.S. taxpayers have already spent over $10 billion to develop (with its SLS launcher... earlier it should have been the Ares-1 which also had several billion dumped into developing and only flew once before being cancelled).
The point is that NASA has tried but is singularly incapable of being able to accomplish this task right now. Instead, the money goes to Russia, which is the on
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This. At least when Boeing was suckling from government teat using government engineers, launching from government land and employing publicly-educated engineers, it didn't have the gall to advertise that "Boeing successfully delivers...", just collect the money.
Oh really? Boeing has never bragged about its connections to NASA and its accomplishments in space?
I guess you learn something new every day.
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Somebody tell the Georgists that there's lots of land on Mars to not own and let's see them beat Musk to the stars. The more the merrier!
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We had a guy like Putin running the show - his name was George W. Bush... and I sincerely doubt you want him back.
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And sure, you could have a free-floating robot that maneuvers with thrusters, but that's just too complicated. (Plus it would need refueling.)
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Like the Canadarm?
I guess that robot can finally get off it's butt (Score:1)
Now that it has legs...
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Since it's intended for space walks, why the ${IMPRECATION} does it needs legs?
I was going to say 'why on Earth', but that's kind of the point. It's not going to be on Earth. It's going to be in zero-gravity, where legs are completely useless.
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For the same reason the Canadarm does... to anchor it to various points on the vehicle.
Big day in Space (Score:2)
NASA's LADEE [thespacereporter.com] ends it's mission to explore the Moon's atmosphere, and Space-X docks at the ISS.
Where are all those who keep saying the US has lost it's interest in Space?
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Without the glamor of our own human transport though.
Yeah, there's been problems, and there is increasing budget pressure. It seems NASA is the only government organization that actually get consistently cut. I kind of agree with Ares I getting cut, it was a boondoggle and suffing some problems that weren't well-publicized.
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Yes, the house republicans have had NO ISSUES with send 2B to Russia to launch humans, but they object to spending 1B to create 3 American companies that can/will launch humans. Why? Because it will compete against their SLS.
What is amazing is that the ho
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Keep in mind that Russia is still sending supplies up to the ISS via the Proton cargo modules... including missions subsidized by the U.S. taxpayers as well.
Be careful about painting all House Republicans with the same brush. While there are certainly some either misguided or even flagrantly ignorant members of that caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives with regards to space policy issues, there are some like Dana Rohrabacher who genuinely do understand the benefits of open competition for launch ser
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And Dana, Like Dr. Griffin, has done wonders for private space. He would be a strong supporter of it even if it was not in his district.
And Giffords, along with the dem from Maryland that pushes the NGT, Have been the only 2 dems that have been hostile towards p
Yay for SpaceX (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only can they deliver supplies to the ISS without the need to pay the Russians to do it but they can probably do it cheaper than the Russians too.
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but they can't deliver people to the ISS without the Russian's. it is hard to have a manned space station without people on board.
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Dragon is beginning its man-rating tests this year.
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Guess why you haven't seen a single picture of video of the re-entry of a Dragon capsule.
Actually there are buckets of photos of recovered capsules. And the first one, I believe, was even donated to the Smithsonian.
Since every CRS flight has returned experiments and samples from ISS, if they failed to reenter properly, SpaceX wouldn't have received payment.
http://www.parabolicarc.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/dragon_ocean_crs1.jpg [parabolicarc.com]
http://seradata.com/SSI/wp-content/uploads/mt/flightglobalweb/blogs/hyperbola/2012/10/30/dragon%20crs1%20small.jpg [seradata.com]
http://www.pddnet.com/sites/pddnet.com/files/KRT-US- [pddnet.com]
Re:Yay for SpaceX (Score:5, Interesting)
And if the house republicans will quit trying to gut CCxDev, SpaceX will launch humans within 12 months.
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I'd mod you up if I hadn't already commented in this thread. The current Dragon already matches the safety requirements of the original (pre-Challenger) Shuttle program. If push comes to shove wrt Russia, we'll be able to rapidly get a "provisional" crewed flight capability, and transition to a fully human-rated system within a couple of years.
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Now, if the house pubs would quit spending billions on the Russians and would instead support American businesses, SpaceX could be not just ready in under 6 months, but the safest craft to have ever launched.
Big Whoop. (Score:1)
The first space station went up in 1971. Forty-three years later, private industry figures out how to send a rocket up there. With taxpayers footing the bill.
John Galt is half a retard.
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The first space station was designed by private industry (what, you thought NASA did its own design work?).
Apollo and Shuttle, which provided transport to Skylab and ISS, were designed by private industry.
And the only reason taxpayers are footing the bill for rockets to ISS is that NASA is the one that wants supplies sent up there. And can't do it on its own, since it has no spacecraft capable of reaching ISS.
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The first space station was designed by private industry
Many decades ago, my mother made bank flying to Moscow to sell cars to the USSR, so I'm perfectly aware that apparatchiks had a habit of enjoying delicious capitalist toys... but Salyut and Almaz were the product of a technocratic, centrally-managed Soviet government... and to suggest that Skylab was "designed by private industry" is thoroughly dishonest. MD made an obvious contribution, as did a surprising number of others firms, but the design was directed throughout by NASA. It was public-private partner
Mod Parent up, please (Score:4, Insightful)
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Sorry friend, the design of the NASA space stations were done by NASA. They had private industry do the industrial part because they wanted to reward big political donations.
Either way though, it's a good thing we didn't wait for "private industry" to go to space, or we'd still be in the Sputnik stage.
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Alas, no. The NASA work on the space stations was limited to design studies that were limited to 'this is what we want a space station to do, and this is the space we have to do it in".
When it came to the engineering part of the design, McDonnell Douglas did Skylab and various companies did ISS (hell, ISS had parts from other countries, much less from outside NASA).
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The first space station was designed by private industry (what, you thought NASA did its own design work?).
Apollo and Shuttle, which provided transport to Skylab and ISS, were designed by private industry.
And the only reason taxpayers are footing the bill for rockets to ISS is that NASA is the one that wants supplies sent up there. And can't do it on its own, since it has no spacecraft capable of reaching ISS.
Go buy this book and stop spouting crap you know nothing about: ``This New Ocean: The story of the First Space Race,'' by William E. Burrows. You'll learn a lot.
Re:Big Whoop. (Score:5, Interesting)
Forty-three years later, private industry figures out how to send a rocket up there. With taxpayers footing the bill.
Unlike every previous launch, however, we the taxpayers are paying a fixed price to SpaceX, instead of the bloated cost-plus contracts that are large part of the reason why there hasn't been much progress in manned spaceflight in the last four decades. Not all of the free-market claims about government inefficiency are nonsense - the previous contractors (all "private industry", loosely defined) had no incentive to develop reusable rockets, because the government just kept paying for new ones.
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Well, it's theoretically less expensive, but not yet. If you extrapolate out 50 missions, you start seeing SpaceX making an actual profit instead of a projected profit based on a fee stream.
My problem is that the entire thing still relies on government. If t
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If there is value in a "private" space industry, it hasn't been found yet.
Yeah, because that multi-billion dollar satellite business just doesn't exist.
My God, Slashdot is full of retards these days.
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Or, convince me that without the initial public investment, any private company would have done the basic research required to send the first satellite into space.
It's not my job to convince you that the private sector would have magically brought about the space age without government intervention, because that isn't what I'm arguing in the first place. Sure, there are lots of examples of technology invented (or aggressively developed) by governments - pretty much anything with military utility, in partic
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Well, it's theoretically less expensive, but not yet. If you extrapolate out 50 missions, you start seeing SpaceX making an actual profit instead of a projected profit based on a fee stream.
Hmmm. Russia would charge us 200 million to launch progress to the ISS with 2.3 tonnes and no return.
SpaceX charges us 120 million to launch dragon with 3.3 tonnes up and 2.5 tonnes back.
And Russia WAS the cheapest going.
So, yeah, I would say that it is in fact, less expensive.
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Hmm, you haven't heard about the market for launching satellites, have you? Which is mostly private. Which 3.5 of the Falcon 9 launches have been.
Projected launches for Falcon 9 over the next few years include eleven launches for the US government, and 17 other launches.
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Well, it's theoretically less expensive, but not yet.
You don't even need to get theoretical here. NASA does not have their own way to bring cargo (or passengers for that matter) to the ISS, so the only realistic comparison is whatever the Russian government (through Roscosmos) wants to charge the U.S. government for delivery to the ISS. Furthermore, the Dragon spacecraft is the only spacecraft built by any country of the Earth that has the capability of bringing cargo from the ISS to the Earth (except for perhaps 20 pounds or so of cargo on the Soyuz space
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My kingdom for mod points right now :(
The BFD (Score:5, Interesting)
Lost in the moronic editing by the eggs-and-dye-mostly department:
After the Falcon 9's first-stage section separated from the upper-stage motor and Dragon capsule, the discarded rocket relit some of its engines to slow its fall back through the atmosphere and position itself to touch down vertically on the ocean before gravity turned it horizontal. The booster also was equipped with four 25-foot-long landings for stabilization.
Data transmitted from an airplane tracking the booster's descent indicated it splashed down intact in the Atlantic Ocean - a first for the company.
"Data upload from tracking plane shows landing in Atlantic was good! Several boats enroute through heavy seas," SpaceX's chief executive, Elon Musk, posted on Twitter late Friday.
This is a Big Fucking Deal. SpaceX publicly gave odds for this working at about 1 in 3. This is an important incremental step in (literally) landing their lower stages, rather than trashing them (like every other launch system) or attempting to recover them after splashdown (like shuttle boosters).
Re:I just can't get excited about SpaceX (Score:5, Insightful)
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Lobbing shit into space with a huge failure rate is easy. Now, try doing it where the failure rate is acceptable enough to put an astronaut on your rocket.
Re:I just can't get excited about SpaceX (Score:5, Interesting)
Heck, by the time that dragon rider launches next year with humans, F9 will have gone up more than 20 x. I think that it more then enough.
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Some private company with a shitload of government backing does what we used to be able to do 40 years ago on our own
This is missing the point entirely. All of the past NASA rockets were also built by private companies with a shitload of government backing. Unlike those companies, SpaceX does not have a blank check; Musk's goal is to be both inexpensive and profitable. Maybe it won't work, but at least someone is trying for a change.
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This has nothing to do with Musk, you stupid fuck. NASA could have employed the engineers itself and done it at cost. But that wouldn't have satisfied the ideological imperative of corporatism.
NASA did employ their engineers and tried to do it at cost.... plus a small profit for the companies they contracted to do the work. That is called a cost-plus contract BTW. What they ended up with was called Constellation and the Ares I. It flew precisely one time on a sub-orbital flight and was promptly cancelled because it was too expensive to fly even for government bureaucrats to admit to... after spending several billion dollars to get that program going.
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Yeah. Because back in the 70s, NASA was landing rovers the size of SUVs on Mars. And had orbiters around Saturn. And probes in interstellar space. And a mission to Pluto. And...
Remind me, what did the Romans ever do for us again?
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SpaceX hasn't managed a single flight without having mayor errors. 100% of their flight had either being a catastrophic failure or a partial failure. They haven't completed a single mission without failing one or two of their total tasks.
They no longer have a 90% rate of failure, but it still over 70% failure rate. Something that is unacceptable even under the lowest of standards.
How the hell do you calculate 70% failure rate for SpaceX? You ought to see how many Atlas rockets were fired before one even cleared the launch tower.
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Because back in the 70s, NASA was landing rovers the size of SUVs on Mars
Viking landers [wikipedia.org]
And had orbiters around Saturn
Pioneer 11 [wikipedia.org]
And a mission to Pluto.
(JPL Voyager FAQ [nasa.gov])
And probes in interstellar space
No, but let's not forget that the probes that are in interstellar space now were launched in the 1970s. The next comparable probe (New Horizons) wasn't launched until 2006. Quite a gap, no?
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Dude, he was being sarcastic
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BUT, these have costs BILLIONS. In order to sustain our exploration, we must lower the costs of this. SpaceX is about to do that. For example, red dragon will make it possible to put the largest lander on the planet, loaded with instruments.
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In addition, SpaceX will also be launching 7 ppl into space, for less than what Russia charges to send 2 ppl.
SpaceX will in less than 2 years, be able to drop their pri
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+1 Informative
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Many years from now... (Score:2)
.