SpaceX's Crew Dragon Capsule Returns To Earth After Historic Test Flight (nbcnews.com) 121
SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule returned safely to Earth early Friday, wrapping up its inaugural mission to the International Space Station and signaling that the U.S. may soon be able to ferry astronauts to and from space without relying on Russian spacecraft. From a report: The uncrewed capsule splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, off the east coast of Florida, at 8:45 a.m. ET after spending almost a week at the space station. The spacecraft undocked from the orbiting outpost Friday at 2:32 a.m. ET to begin its descent. "This is an amazing achievement in American history," NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said from the space agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "These are all capabilities that are leading to a day where we are launching American astronauts on American rockets from American soil." The Crew Dragon capsule was lofted into orbit March 2 by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The flight was a crucial test of the new spacecraft, a seven-passenger vehicle that SpaceX has been developing for the past five years.
Vehicle to transport astronauts to the launch pad (Score:5, Funny)
(that is a serious question. any real information would be interesting.)
Re:Vehicle to transport astronauts to the launch p (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't heard that, but I would find it highly unlikely as I believe the crew will be in their pressure suits which would be very tight/awkward in anything less than a van.
Also, if there are up to seven astronauts going on the flight, that would mean up to four Model X's to transport the astronauts (four if an astronaut can't sit shotgun).
Re: Vehicle to transport astronauts to the launch (Score:1)
Did you mean dock? If so then this capsule actually did dock autonomously, the only commands sent from the station were test aborts to make sure it would respond, otherwise it docked on it's own.
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Uh.. the capsule socked on it's own
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the capsule socked on its own
FTFY
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Uh.. the capsule socked on it's own
They meant "docked", but you'll have to forgive the AC. English isn't their first language and Russians have a hard time pronouncing the sound of the letter D.
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Congratulations! (Score:3, Insightful)
We've replicated 1960s technology!
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I'm not sure if you're being disingenuous here, or just retarded. This is a major leap in technology over the capsules from the 60's / 70's...
https://www.ajc.com/news/national/apollo-command-module-crew-dragon-the-numbers/Un1wCkEEGN4p5kICQHubvI/
Not to mention Dragon2 is reusable, and a heck of a lot cheaper to launch than anything prior.
Re:Congratulations! (Score:5, Informative)
Not to mention Dragon2 is reusable
Not for crewed flights it isn't. Boeing's Starliner will be re-used for crewed flights, but Dragon2 will not. Used capsules will be repurposed for unmanned cargo flights only.
This is because dry landings are a requirement for re-use, and SpaceX decided to discontinue propulsive landing development in favour of parachutes and water landings. They did this because they wanted to spend the resources on Starship instead.
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Not everyone seems to know (Score:2)
"This is an amazing achievement in American history," NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said from the space agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "These are all capabilities that are leading to a day where we are launching American astronauts on American rockets from American soil."
suggests that he is completely unaware of what was happening in the 1960's and 70's which is even more surprising given that he was the NASA spokesperson.
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The 60s tech was much more fiddly. For instance, a 60s rocket engine had an order fo magnitude more parts than today's.
We're replicated 60s capability, and it's about time.
Reusability (Score:3)
The 60s capsules were throw away. the Dragon is reusable. This makes it affordable to build much nicer seats, controls and creature comforts into the capsule. Its the difference between a WW2 Glider and a private Citation 6 seater plane.
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After landing the Dragon capsule will be reconfigured for cargo only. I guess they can take the seats out and reuse those in another capsule, but they could already do that with any other capsule.
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That maybe for NASA missions as NASA is hyperconservative and does not want to reuse. However for commercial space tourism I will bet they will reuse the same capsules. In contrast the 60s capsules were allowed to sink to the bottom of the ocean if not needed for inspection.
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In contrast the 60s capsules were allowed to sink to the bottom of the ocean if not needed for inspection.
Huh? Now that I'd like to see a citation for unless you consider every capsule needed for inspection.
There was one or two that accidentally sank or allowed to burn up IIRC but most are still around including the Gemini (2) that was reused (unmanned).
Can't find a citation right now but I believe Gemini was intended to be reusable. It was actually the most advanced of the spacecraft due to being designed latest and originally was meant to land on land using a para-glider.
Lists of locations of the spacecraft,
h [wikipedia.org]
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A simple question which you have already answered partially.
How many were reused?
If the answer is 1 , they are not really reusable are they?
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Cost cutting along with doing something new and being really careful.
Another change was spy satellites removing the military's needs for a reusable spacecraft to go to their observation stations.
Unlike SpaceX, NASA didn't have any shoulders to stand on and had to do this stuff for the first time, generally with minimal computer power as well, something that is very important for SpaceX.
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. The Saturn V rocket is still the most powerful rocket on record.
Sort of. You can contrive a definition of that statement that makes it true. The Russians certainly launched more powerful rockets, but they didn't do so well. Also, "powerful" could be talking about either thrust or delta-v.
The Apollo Guidance Computer was ahead of its time with performance similar to a 6502 microprocessor found in Apple II and other 8-bit computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Not so much, though it did have a surprising amount of memory. Nearly impossible to reprogram to fix a bug though. Also, it was one of the worst-managed software projects around, and entirely failed to meet its goal. All the burn calculations ended up being done on the ground.
It wa
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I don't think "successfully launched" is too outlandish of a definition to be considered "contrived". Russia never built a working rocket that was more powerful than the Saturn V.
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Fair enough. You just see a lot of very loosely defined claims of why my favorite rocket is best in internet discussions. It's as bad as Ford vs Chevy pickup truck discussion.
I would rather say "Saturn V successfully launched a larger payload to LEO than anyone else", or other such specific claim. I do find it amusing that China's planned Death March 9, err, Long March 9 rocket will exactly match the Saturn V in LEO capability. Someone has rocket envy.
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Not quite. I recommend the book, "Digital Apollo" to get a good picture of what was going on. Very enlightening. The AGC was indeed capable of navigating all the way to the moon on its own with only its calculations and inertial guid
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"Crash proof"? Perhaps. It was certainly very tight code, and while it didn't "crash" in the traditional sense it definitely gave Apollo 11 a tense moment. I'm given to understand the error displayed during the landing sequence was there to inform operators that the computer was running low on resources and was prioritizing jobs. This isn't a crash of course, but the fact that the computer would face constraints in scheduling tasks is certainly a deficiency, and the poorly documented, unfriendly error (
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We've replicated 1960s technology!
As with commercial aviation, our big advance over the tech of that time is in reduced cost. This will be what really opens the sky.
Re: Congratulations! (Score:2)
Reusability makes all the difference.
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Well the Shuttle was intended to be reusable and probably would have been if the Air Force hadn't been involved. It can also be argued the tech wasn't quite there. SpaceX has some pretty tall shoulders to stand on and reach so high.
IIRC, Gemini capsules were considered for reuse before budget considerations changed that and Gemini 2's capsule did fly twice.
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NAC provides Starliner, Dragon 2 update – Commercial Crew preps entering final leg to launch [nasaspaceflight.com]
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is it true that SpaceX has selected Tesla to provide the transport vehicle?
Little known fact, that Tesla that got sent to Mars with the empty suit in the drivers seat... that wasn't empty, it was someone who got in to test to see if a suited astronaut would fit and fell asleep.
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The Zero G indicator (Score:4, Funny)
Couldn't they have at least selected a different toy: the stuffed plush Alien Face Grabber? That would have been much better to be in the capsule with "Ripley" on this demo flight.
Re:The Zero G indicator (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Yeah. Historic ... AGAIN! (Score:4, Informative)
What private company has done this before?
This is a first.
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Rockwell, McDonnell, and Boeing built the landers for the Gemini and Apollo missions, funded by the US government. How much of the Dragon Capsule was funded by the US government? I'm somewhat unclear on why this new generation is "commercial" but what we did in the 1960's isn't.
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The difference is how much in the way of specifications, drawings, and input were given to the contractor. In the case of the Apollo era capsules, NASA and the various contractors were tightly integrated from beginning to end. Much of the manufacturing (especially of the larger pieces of the rockets) was conducted at NASA owned facilities.
When it comes to the Dragon, NASA set various requirements (Must carry x Astronauts, compartment must meet y environmental requirements, must use the IDA, etc...) and othe
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"Commercial" doesn't mean what you think in this context. The previous efforts were NASA projects with components farmed out to different vendors for development. NASA is famously bad as managing cross-vendor projects like that (almost every disaster can be traced to a failure to communicate properly netween vendors). This is different: NASA just set some acceptance criteria for a capsule, and bought them as finished projects from vendors: SpaceX and Boeing. The rocket launches to prove these capsules a
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Well, not quite. NASA launches require significantly more verification and checkout than standard F9 launches. NASA also required certain changes (new COPV design among others) to permit the "Load 'n Go" style launches, and to avoid an AMOS-6 type RUD.
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Congratulations on a great flight! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing more to say, it looks like it was done flawlessly.
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Including it's flawless inability to dock on its own
https://www.nasaspaceflight.co... [nasaspaceflight.com]
Re: Congratulations on a great flight! (Score:4, Interesting)
Including it's flawless inability to dock on its own.
It docked on its own. I watched it live.
Really, the transparent lies are kind of pathetic.
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From what I've gleaned from business articles, Musk is pretty much just a rain maker for Space X - he's hands off of everything else. Vision? Yes. But day to day operations? No.
Really? So the micro-management stories from SpaceX are all lies?
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You could even say... "FLAWLESS VICTORY!" /KillerInstinct
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It's worth adding that Boeing's Starliner will launch on an Atlas V, which uses Russian rocket engines. Boeing is sppinning it as "US astronauts launched from US soil", but only SpaceX can brag about "US rockets".
ULA hopes to swap out the Russian RD-180 engines on the Atlas V for Blue Origin's BE-4 engines one day, but that's a ways off.
No People Next Time - Next is in flight abort test (Score:2)
No people aboard - scheduled for July (https://nextspaceflight.com/launches/details/1162)
First crewed flight is planned for November (https://nextspaceflight.com/launches/details/1002)
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Back to the future? (Score:2)
"This is an amazing achievement in American history," NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said from the space agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "These are all capabilities that are leading to a day where we are launching American astronauts on American rockets from American soil."
So "leading" back to May 5, 1961, then? I had no idea NASA now has the capability to travel back in time 60 years.
My parents let me stay up to watch Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, and I sent money earned from my fir
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"This is an amazing achievement in American history," NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said from the space agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "These are all capabilities that are leading to a day where we are launching American astronauts on American rockets from American soil."
So "leading" back to May 5, 1961, then? I had no idea NASA now has the capability to travel back in time 60 years.
My parents let me stay up to watch Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, and I sent money earned from my first real job to help keep Viking's data gathering operation going after funding ran out. And I was actually in the room at the AAAS conference in Toronto in January 1981, when the pictures from Voyager 1's November flyby of Saturn, showing the braided rings, were released. So I'm old enough to remember what an incredible space program America had, and to understand what world-changing scientific and technological advances it produced.
All I can do now is shake my head. I feel genuine grief over what it has become of the United States since the bean counters and warmongers took over.
NASA has had a pretty robust unmanned program that used US technology to send stuff into space. the problem with manned flight, IMHO, was everything was based on the idea that Shuttle would be a reusable, fast turnaround, space transport system (STS), when it failed to live up to the grandiose expectations there was no real follow-on launch vehicle in the works. NASA had a few Shuttle v2 ideas but none of them came to fruition. Part of the problem may have been wanting to continue the idea of a reusable cra
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I doubt we would have seen a return to a Gemini/Titan type rocket... The age of Hypergols for main propulsion is pretty much gone due to the toxicity and difficulty in handling the propellants. When you fundamentally change the propellants for a given rocket, you're pretty much stuck with designing a whole new rocket. Also, Titan is too small of a diameter to fit anything larger than a two person capsule on top.
The better option, had they gone that way earlier, would have been to design/build a capsule to p
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If I wasn't already commenting on this conversation, I'd definitely give you a mod point for "Informative".
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Even as a kid (what we now call a "young adult") I remember thinking that putting all the money available for manned space exploration into the Shuttle was a huge, huge mistake. Basically, it led to the death of America's space program. Yes, there has been some very good work done, but it's been done on a shoestring. America could almost certainly have had a colony on Mars by now if they hadn't made some disastrous decisions. And I mean an AMERICAN colony with visitors, not an Earth colony paid for by t
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Re:Back to the future? (Score:4, Interesting)
William Proxmire's grave is in Lake Forest Cemetery Lake Forest, Lake County, Illinois, USA. Piss on it for me, please.
Yes, cowardly, craven American politicians including Mr. Proxmire cancelled the last three Apollo missions when we already had the spacecraft for Apollo 18 sitting around, essentially ended manned space exploration for three generations (earth orbit is not exploration), and as far as I can tell achieved no real purpose with the money "saved", other than fighting stupid wars that cost much more than any space program. The Saturn V at the Saturn V Center in Florida is mostly the vehicle that should have flown as Apollo 18. There are also some pieces from Skylab missions, made to look like the Apollo versions.
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The Apollo 18 Saturn V is at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Bruce. I played on that thing when I was kid. In conjunction with the Smithsonian, it was restored back in 2007 and a building was built around it to protect it from the elements. It's quite a sight to behold!
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It might well be worth a road trip to do exactly that. I remember his "Golden Fleece" awards, and the damage they did to legitimate scientific inquiry. Oddly, the hypocritical prick never had a problem with all the dairy subsidies flowing into his state.
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I too mourn the lack of funding for our space programs. That said the only reason why it got the funding it did for the Apollo program and such was warmongering with Russia. The Ruskies putting a satellite into orbit really turbo charged the US efforts to get into space. And it's a good thing too, otherwise we'd probably still be picking up the pieces from them raping our churches and burning our women by now if we hadn't beat them to the Moon! Sure for the people involved in the actual space programs and a
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I think you've got a good point there. I guess some general or other maybe persuaded the congress creatures they could get more bang for the buck with a few more fighter planes, or a semi-useful bomber.
Docking vs. Berthing (Score:5, Informative)
Cargo Dragon berths, which means the Canadarm catches it and it is bolted to a berthing port. Berthing ports have a larger opening than the International Docking Adapter, and you can get larger diameter cargo through the door. Crew vehicles dock so that a crew can abandon the ISS or board the uninhabited ISS - nobody would be on board to operate the arm and bolt the vehicle to the berthing port.
A berthing port can have an IDA attached to it, and then becomes a docking port.
Crew Dragon docks autonomously without needing assistance from the ISS or the crew on board the Dragon.
Splash? (Score:2)
Re:Splash? (Score:4, Informative)
They were planning three modes of operation: parachute splashdown, parachutes plus thruster assist, and full thruster landings. They decided to focus on the first two, at NASA's request.
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They decided not to pursue the thruster landing because it would require a lot more effort to prove its safety. A parachute landing is based on well known technology. They may still do it at a later time.
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They decided not to pursue the thruster landing because it would require a lot more effort to prove its safety. A parachute landing is based on well known technology. They may still do it at a later time.
They could, but it wouldn't really make any sense. NASA is their only customer and they're willing to pay the price to have it their way, if there's any savings SpaceX would probably have to give most of it to make them switch. And NASA might eventually turn it down in the end because of the potential political fallout of losing men to what fairly or unfairly will be considered gambling with the safety of astronauts to save a few bucks. If another customer shows up they'll have a NASA certified package read
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In addition to the reasons mentioned by religionofpeas, they decided that it would be expensive to develop and certify, and that the vehicle itself wasn't going to see much use for manned spaceflight (Crew Dragon is probably only ever going to be used for ISS flights). They decided to shift those resources to Starship development, which is also going to land propulsively, and have a lot more potential missions. Starship should be capable of handling the manned ISS flights, but also the manned lunar gateway
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Dragon 2 is dead end tech for SpaceX now. They have a lucrative contract with NASA and they are going to do the bare minimum to deliver it safely. All development focus is now moving to Starship.
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Capsule Spinning (Score:1)
I watched the full four-minute video, and was struck by how much the capsule was spinning and lurching beneath the parachutes. I imagined myself in the capsule and it didn't look like a lot of fun. I wonder if the stresses on the astronauts are worse during the return (pitch and yaw) than the launch (nearly vertical acceleration).
One example is 40-60 seconds into the video, but there are others: Video link [youtube.com]
Seven passengers is good... (Score:1)
How many cup holders does it have?
One Day the Moon! (Score:1)