First SpaceX Mission With Astronauts Set For June 2019 (france24.com) 48
schwit1 shares a report from France 24: NASA has announced the first crewed flight by a SpaceX rocket to the International Space Station (ISS) is expected to take place in June 2019. It will be the first manned U.S. launch to the orbiting research laboratory since the space shuttle program was retired in 2011, forcing U.S. astronauts to hitch costly rides aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft. A flight on Boeing spacecraft is set to follow in August 2019. The timetable for both launches has already been postponed several times, but NASA said Thursday it would now be providing monthly updates on deadlines. Both missions are considered tests: the two astronauts transported in each flight will spend two weeks aboard the orbiting ISS before returning to Earth. SpaceX will carry out an uncrewed test in January 2019, and Boeing in March 2019.
Elon getting high as the space shuttle (Score:3, Funny)
Launch date set for 4/20, funding for Doritos and moon pies secured.
Grab some popcorn (Score:5, Interesting)
Boeing doesn't play fair, and they would just hate to be upstaged by an upstart, when they've gotten fat off of sucking the federal tit forever.
Expect some unexpected developments, either in the media or on some legislative subcommittee or both, to try to slow Elon down.
Re:Grab some popcorn (Score:5, Interesting)
Expect some unexpected developments, either in the media or on some legislative subcommittee or both, to try to slow Elon down.
Yup. That's how they got the KC-46 contract. The military rejected their crappy overpriced plane, so Boeing went whining to Congress, and the USAF was forced to accept it. Lemon socialism [wikipedia.org] at its worst.
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I always heard the phrase "crony capitalism" where bribes to politicians ensure financial assistance or protectionism for a company.
But "lemon socialism" is an even better term! :-)
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Re:But this is different (Score:2)
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Boeing doesn't play fair, and they would just hate to be upstaged by an upstart, when they've gotten fat off of sucking the federal tit forever.
Expect some unexpected developments, either in the media or on some legislative subcommittee or both, to try to slow Elon down.
Range safety is very important.
Re:With out man-rated vehicle, I don't think so (Score:4, Informative)
Re:With out man-rated vehicle, I don't think so (Score:5, Interesting)
The Dragon capsule is no where near being man-rated, so the changes of actually flying with a human is ZERO right now.
says someone commenting on an article about the timetable for crew-rating the Dragon capsule in the near future.
Here are some articles about the crew-rating of Dragon and Starliner:
https://www.nasaspaceflight.co... [nasaspaceflight.com]
https://www.nasaspaceflight.co... [nasaspaceflight.com]
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Pretty sure that that's not true.
Though if it were true, it's no longer true, since I just watched a SpaceX launch that put the satellite into the target orbit....
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Also the Dragon capsule has its own thrusters and guidance system to make the necessary orbital adjustments to dock with ISS, so there's no problem.
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The Dragon capsule is no where near being man-rated, so the changes of actually flying with a human is ZERO right now.
Come on... Musk has his Gnatt chart that clearly shows he can hit that deadline... Never mind there is zero slack for mistakes or schedule slippages and zero tolerance for the unknown unknowns that always popup in complex engineering projects..
Business folks do this kind of projecting all the time. They sit down, assume nothing goes wrong, takes longer than estimated, or unforeseen problems pop up on the critical path and declare the end date certain when their engineers have a list of major risks a mile
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A deadline based on the idea that nothing goes wrong is a good strategy. Obviously, things will go wrong, and you'll slip. But if you had put in sufficient slack right from the start, people would use up the slack, and then still hit problems.
Even shorter deadlines are counterproductive, because if prospects are completely hopeless, people start giving up. You want to give the engineers just enough hope that they can do it.
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PHB alert..
Oh I get that, and we tried to meet their required dates, though within a month we had already slipped almost a month. You see the problem was, it will take as long as it takes. No amount of hurrying will fix that working longer each day only helps for a week or two and nothing good happens when the team is tired. It was during that project that I started managing risks aggressively though and I started publishing the probability we could meet the various milestones based on a list of risks. Ma
Russian Trolls (Score:2)
Of all the articles on Slashdot, this one really WILL attract FUD from Russian trolls. It's Russia that is losing their NASA contract for ferrying US astronauts to the space station when SpaceX (and eventually Boeing) can do it.
The Trump administration had better invent some bullshit reason for continuing to funnel money to Roscosmos or a bunch of maintenance guys who know how to cobble together an ICBM out of spare parts are going to be out of a job.