SpaceX One Step Closer To Launching Astronaut 70
BarbaraHudson writes SpaceX has passed NASA's "certification baseline review," which required the company to outline exactly how it plans to ferry crews to and from the International Space Station using the Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket under SpaceX's Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contract with NASA. The contract will include at least one test flight with an astronaut in the spacecraft.
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This astronaut is going to wind up dead. Good thing the dragon capsule doubles as a coffin.
Do you have any idea how many people would volunteer to take the ride, even with the risks? Either way, it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Re:That's will be one dead astronugh (Score:5, Informative)
Musk and everyone at space x should be executed for the murder they are going to commit.
By that thinking, everyone at NASA should have been executed after the capsule fire that killed astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee.
Astronauts know that what they are doing is fraught with risk. As one of them said, "You're sitting on millions of pounds of explosive chemicals, with thousands of parts, all made by the lowest bidder."
The don't have to ask what could go wrong. They know. And they still go.
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Drug addicts like you should be tied to the launch pad underneath the engines. The world will be a better place when you and your ilk are all dead.
Someone pee in your Wheaties, dude?
Re:That's will be one dead astronugh (Score:5, Insightful)
Musk and everyone at space x should be executed for the murder they are going to commit.
By that thinking, everyone at NASA should have been executed after the capsule fire that killed astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee.
That's was as an accident by a government agency. Space x is going to commit murder for profit. If you're too stupid to understand the difference you should be executed along side them.
So nominate me to make the flight. If it blows up, you get what you want. If it doesn't, I get what I want. Either way, we ultimately advance our knowledge and capabilities.
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There's a great ted talk by a real astronaut on the risks. 1 in 40 chance of dying, and why he still makes the flight:
Ted Talks [ted.com]
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So, your concern is that the spaceship was assembled by a for-profit company instead of a government agency? Because pretty a whole bunch of the parts for NASA spacecraft are made by for-profit companies...this is part of the pork-barrelling of NASA, by making them buy parts from companies all over the US, regardless of who could make the best part or an adequate part for less.
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Trollope. At worstif they it a lot of corners and compromised savety it could be negligent manslaughter. But if they practiced reasonable care then it is merely an accident.
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I remember a quote from Neil Armstrong saying that he felt there'd only be a 50% chance that he'd actually be able to land on the moon successfully (a failed landing probably meant a slow death.)
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You know, this would make an interesting slashdot poll. "Would you volunteer to go on SpaceX's first manned flight?"
[_] Yes.
[_] Hell,. yes.
[_] I just volunteered my boss.
[_] Anything to get away from my ex.
[_] Does it come with free flight insurance?
[_] Depends - do I have to be groped by a TSA droid?
[_] Sure - it's not like they can be worse at losing my luggage.
[_] I was okay with it until I heard their theme song was David Bowie's "Space Oddity"
[_] CowboyNeil already tried to boost me into orbit
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Just trolls ... /. should really autohide anything that is voted negative AND is AC.
But then APK would have to get an account to crap-flood multiple times after most of my posts, so his posts would start out visible to many others. This way, anyone who isn't logged in doesn't see them, same as anyone who uses the Simply Slashdot app, and he still gets to waste his time, which means he isn't doing it to someone else. "It's a tough job, but someone has to keep him from playing in traffic" :-)
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Maybe the astronauts know and accept the risks of their chosen profession but their families don't seem to. Google up "Apollo 1 Lawsuit", "Challenger Space Shuttle Settlement" or "Columbia Space Shuttle Settlement". In every case either NASA or a NASA contractor paid off the families, $26.6 million in the Columbia case. Legal actions were initiated after each disaster.
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The GP post is clearly bullshit, it's in no way in spacex's interests to deliberately kill an astronaut, especially given that the government has multiple contractors working independently on commercial crew transport. However I have a feeling you are being overoptimistic.
overall chance of casualties from launch and landing activities of its Dragon capsule at 30-in-1 million
NASA management came out with similar figures for the space shuttle. http://sunnyday.mit.edu/accide... [mit.edu]
Yet the actual crew loss rate for manned space vehicles has been in the single digit percentages. The space shuttle has had two crew loss
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That's what this country has turned into: a bunch of cowards. And worse, they're the special bunch of cowards who are jealous of the people who stick their necks out and try to chop it off at first chance.
this is good news (Score:5, Insightful)
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You stupid Americans are so clueless it is beyond believe. A lot of people don't even like the Russians but even they can see the contrast today.
Your entire nation is a lie.
I am NOT from, or living in, the USA. Replacing a gang of thugs with a gang of crooks doesn't look much different.
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Really? He caused 2 wars (Score:2)
How has he been a better world citizen. He's been as bad as USA, probably more.
And I'm not saying this to praise USA. As someone else said, this is a choice between a thug and a crook.
Well, ok, unless you count the whole mass surveilance business. And then othe
Re: Imagine going back in time 15 years and warnin (Score:2)
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Really? In what way?
He's a secular despot, which I'd take over any theocracy.
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Which is a real pity because your format could have been either brilliant social commentary or very funny, depending on if you either stuck to the god's honest truth, or just exaggerated things a bit more.
7 seats on the Dragon (Score:3)
but they only send up 3 people at a time to ISS. Seems like a waste. They should set up a lottery for an extra person or two, seems reasonable. I'll buy some tickets.
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The dragon will be in service much longer than the ISS. SpaceX is playing the long game.
I'm also excited to see a future where returning astronauts no longer have to be plucked out of the ocean (old school capsules) or have a really hard landing in a cornfield (soyuz). The super-draco engines on the dragon v2 are designed to be used as retro-rockets so the capsule could land anywhere (softly!) with pinpoint accuracy. Of course, it still can drop into the ocean safely if the engines aren't nominal.
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Each astronaut who flies on the Soyuz, even if it's just a return journey, has to be trained and checked out in Russia for these craft. Though most landings happen without incident, it's not some simple, routine thing to land in Soyuz. Things can and do go wrong, and each person in Soyuz has to know what to do. So even crew members that arrived on the shuttle had to be checked out on the Soyuz, whether that was for escape purposes, or for the regular ride home. The same thing would be required for crew
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>
I'm not sure how long Dragon is allowed to remain in space. Would be nice if they could use it as an emergency exit as well.
The last paragraph in the article:
Dragon is expected to last up to 210 days while docked to the International Space Station, providing an escape route if astronauts need to leave the orbiting complex quickly.
You're welcome, and happy 2015 :-)
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In the '60s we had enough workforce and disposable income to build rockets with western engineers right here and do it right.
Western engineers like Wernher Von Braun and his buddies [wikipedia.org]?
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A few dozen Germans, on a workforce exceeding 100,000 at the height of the Apollo program.
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Yes, they are Western engineers. I'm guessing you're from the US and assume the Western only refers to Americas. Actually it was Europe that was considered the west first and America was added on later (as a kind of after thought)...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... [wikipedia.org]
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In what definition of western is Germany and hence Von Braun not included?
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In the '60s we had enough workforce and disposable income to build rockets with western engineers right here and do it right.
Well, some of those "western engineers" weren't from "right here" and weren't part of "we".
Re: Back to the 60s (Score:2)