Watch NASA Astronauts on SpaceX Crew Dragon Docking with ISS (youtube.com) 55
"We're less than 10 meters away..."
"@AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug are suited up, strapped in their seats and ready to be welcomed by the crew aboard the @Space_Station," NASA tweeted an hour ago.
They're now just 135 meters away from the space station, and you can watch the docking live on YouTube.
1,024,406 people are already watching...
"NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken reported that the capsule was performing beautifully, as they closed in for the docking," reports the Associated Press. "The gleaming white capsule was easily visible from the station, its nose cone open exposing its docking hook, as the two spacecraft zoomed a few miles apart above the Atlantic, then Africa, then Asia." It's the first time a privately built and owned spacecraft is carrying crew to the orbiting lab. Hurley, the Dragon's commander, prepared to take manual control for a brief test, then shift the capsule into automatic for the linkup, 19 hours after liftoff. In case of a problem, the astronauts slipped back into their pressurized launch suits for the docking. The three space station residents trained cameras on the incoming capsule for flight controllers at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, as well as NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
UPDATE: At 7:16 PST, soft capture was successfully completed. We are now "moments away" from their boarding, with an official "welcoming ceremony" expected to happen soon.
"@AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug are suited up, strapped in their seats and ready to be welcomed by the crew aboard the @Space_Station," NASA tweeted an hour ago.
They're now just 135 meters away from the space station, and you can watch the docking live on YouTube.
1,024,406 people are already watching...
"NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken reported that the capsule was performing beautifully, as they closed in for the docking," reports the Associated Press. "The gleaming white capsule was easily visible from the station, its nose cone open exposing its docking hook, as the two spacecraft zoomed a few miles apart above the Atlantic, then Africa, then Asia." It's the first time a privately built and owned spacecraft is carrying crew to the orbiting lab. Hurley, the Dragon's commander, prepared to take manual control for a brief test, then shift the capsule into automatic for the linkup, 19 hours after liftoff. In case of a problem, the astronauts slipped back into their pressurized launch suits for the docking. The three space station residents trained cameras on the incoming capsule for flight controllers at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, as well as NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
UPDATE: At 7:16 PST, soft capture was successfully completed. We are now "moments away" from their boarding, with an official "welcoming ceremony" expected to happen soon.
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That is bizarrely paranoid. It assumes that people somehow credit Trump for the culmination of a program that started years before he was even running for office.
Re: Sad how many Trump haters... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sure, I'll give him credit or blame for Artemis, but not everything is about Trump.
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Seriously? Trump tries to take the credit for everything positive and deflect blame for everything negative. He tried taking credit for results showing improved cancer survival in recent years (recent as in before his presidency). He was taking credit for a positive economy from before his actual inauguration. He's completely shameless.
Budgeting is not mission building or vision (Score:2)
it's standing in front of a parade taking credit. THis is a pattern for trump, taking credit for everything past presidents seeded and nurtured but not accomplishing or planning anything of his own.
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With 330 million people in the country, there's bound to be a few people who would respond way to a hypothetical catastrophic mission failure with loss of life. But it's irrational to have an emotional reaction to that because the scenario is hypothetical.
If you're turning to what *some* people *might* do in a situation that *might* happen to shape your view of what is happening right now, there's a word for that: hysteria. You'd be upset all the time about things that haven't actually happened. At th
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I watched the entire DM2 stream, and Bridenstine spent some time ingratiating himself to Trump, but even the most liberal comments were basically, "Bridenstine knows where the money comes from"
Aside from that, not a single person on any streams I watched expressed a desire to see trump hurt by a DM2 failure, to suggest so is just "fantasy flopping" from right wing trump supporters, who have proven to be complete snowflakes considering how much hate and venom they throw at Dems
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I was thinking it would be more Boeing people than Trump-haters....
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I was thinking it would be more Boeing people than Trump-haters....
Yep. If anything this is yet another spanner into the works of the nice pork feed they had there. ULA is sh*tting bricks that's for certain.
Everyone else is celebrating. Even the Russians. In their own unique Russian way. There is NO HIGHER COMPLIMENT from them as far as Space is concerned than this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
This is their equivalent to "Ground Control to Major Tom" from about the same era (mid-1980es). It is what is on the tannoy for every launch ever since.
Awesome deep fake b
Re: Sad how many Trump haters... (Score:1)
ULA is sh*tting bricks that's for certain.
ULA, the CCP and Roscosmos, in no particular order.
Re:Sad how many Trump haters... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Sad how many Trump haters... (Score:2)
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I wanted it to blow up. Nothing to do with Trump though, I'm just tired of living and want to watch the world burn.
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However, trump deserves neither credit nor blame WRT Commercial Crew. It was Lori Garver that got it off the ground, and then Bolden/O that kept it going, while the GOP worked hard to kill SpaceX's participation in CC.
What has Trump or Bridenstine done for/against CC? Absolutely NOTHING.
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I'm not clear on how you or anyone would think such an event would make Trump look bad.
For starters all he would do is blame the failure on Obama somehow. The same way he blames Obama for Trump failures in this current pandemic response. And you and all the Trump supporters would eat that up like starving dogs.
Or would you like to assert that Trump would step up take responsibility for the good of the nation no matter how much mud splashed on him. Not even a moron would believe that but I suppose t
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Finally, I was no big fan of Ronald Reagan but I remember one of his better if not best moments was right after the Challenger blew up he got on TV. I thought his reassurance hit all the right notes and what was needed at the time. Apparently Trump supporters take it as a given that Trump could not possibly do that or anything close.
Yep, one of the best American speeches of the 20th century, in my opinion. I was curious and found a list [americanrhetoric.com] that ranked it at #8, which seems reasonable to me. There's a reason he was known as The Great Communicator, and has six speeches listed in those top 100.
I almost feel it's bad luck to talk about the Challenger during this mission, but on the other hand, there are so many important lessons to learn from the Challenger about diligence and safety that we really owe it to both the Challenger seven and ou
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https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/38204... [nasa.gov]
Now where's that toity with the long instructions? (Score:5, Interesting)
To Bob and Doug! [wikimedia.org] You made it!
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Re: Now where's that toity with the long instructi (Score:1)
They and SpX have my respect.
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Hell yeah, this is how history is made! (Score:4, Interesting)
Watched the launch. Watched some of the docking.
I'd be interested in the # of person-years this took to this point.
Anyway, two days to remember. Awesome stuff.
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We can make space stations and spacecraft using lowest cost foreign manufacturers that seal perfectly airtight in the vacuum of space, but are completely incapable of making a coffee cup lid that stays on the cup or keeps the contents inside!
Re: Hell yeah, this is how history is made! (Score:2)
Where the hell are you getting your coffee? Obviously not the same places as me ...
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And they're in!
Also Ted Cruz is on the ground talking it up lol.
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The docking process was so ridiculously slow, with such a huge number of manual steps and lots of human labour. That must drive Musk crazy.
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Ummm, pretty much the only manual steps (for the Dragon, not necessarily the ISS) were the tests by the pilot of the Dragon.
Normally, Dragons (uncrewed till now) do that all automagically. And in this case, the only parts that weren't automagic were verifying that the controls worked as intended.
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Tests of new technology when failure could kill someone tend to be like that. Once they have confidence in it, things will be a lot more automatic.
Re:Hell yeah, this is how history is made! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd be interested in the # of person-years this took to this point.
For SpaceX, this is the culmination of the main focus of their work since the beginning. I'd estimate that at 30-40,000 man-years, all together. A big project, but there are often successful projects at that scale in the modern era. Heck, even in the ancient world, there were projects of that scale.
For the ISS: the ISS is the most expensive structure ever built. When you add in all the costs to launch, assemble, and maintain its parts and the people onboard, it might well be the largest project mankind has ever completed.
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For the ISS: the ISS is the most expensive structure ever built. When you add in all the costs to launch, assemble, and maintain its parts and the people onboard, it might well be the largest project mankind has ever completed.
As such, astronaut time aboard the station is very likely the most expensive human hours in the solar system.
And boy did they waste a lot of it for political campaign speeches after the astronauts boarded. Ted Cruz straight up gave a stump speech. The only thing he didn't say was "Vote for me next election!" He said every other sentence you'd expect. Yay you didn't vote against the transition bill, Ted. What do you want, a cookie? No senator from Texas, Florida, or Mississippi can vote against any NAS
Re: Hell yeah, this is how history is made! (Score:2)
You could shorten "privately built and owned" (Score:4, Informative)
... to just "privately owned", because the Space Shuttle Orbiter was privately built by Rockwell International (now part of Boeing). The Soyuz spacecraft is privately built by Energia, a publicly traded company listed as "RKKE" on the Moscow Stock Exchange.
Rockwell also did all the detailed design on the Space Shuttle, to meet a government-mandated system concept and design restrictions (space plane, 3 liquid fueled engine, external fuel tank, 2 SRBs). Rockwell won against competing designs bid from Lockheed, McDonnell-Douglas, and Grumman.
I'd say the distinguishing characteristics of Dragon 2 are:
* privately owned
* privately conceived.
Re: You could shorten "privately built and owned" (Score:4, Interesting)
No, while the shuttle was built by a private business, it was built to government specifications and entirely funded with government money. The Dragon capsule was designed and built in-house by spacex and AFAIK the government had zero input other than buying launch contracts and overseeing some of the safety testing.
Kinda like the difference between the F-18 and the 777. Sure they're both built by Boeing, but the government had a hell of a lot more influence in the design of the former than the latter.
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NASA provided about 45% of the initial development costs of the Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule, and obviously they had at least some say in specifications.
Re: You could shorten "privately built and owned" (Score:4, Informative)
Well, they did insist that Dragon only hold 4 people on NASA missions instead of the 7 that it can carry on SpaceX missions
But, that was really after the fact
From the Bridenstine/Musk interview on Everyday Astronaut they stated that SpaceX's aggressive advancements have directly influenced NASA processes and vice versa, but the specs on the original $400M contract were pretty open, such that the move from 7 to 4 crew members came very late in the design process
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Sure. The vision is to get NASA out of the routine spaceflight business, but manned orbital flight is not a viable private enterprise *yet*. There's only one customer, who is underwriting a lot of your development expenses and guaranteeing you future business.
I suspect that the 47% public funding level was carefully chosen so it would still be greater than half privately-funded. It's a significant milestone, but it's not 100% private enterprise yet.
Re: You could shorten "privately built and owned" (Score:2)
The vision is to get NASA out of the routine spaceflight business, but manned orbital flight is not a viable private enterprise *yet*.
No, of course not. Nobody expected it to be. But the cargo spaceflight business is, and since the manned spaceflight capability uses almost entirely the same components, it overlaps beautifully into a niche where spacex can make a tonne of money off the government by launching astronauts on missions that are almost identical to their cargo missions. They're charging NASA $50 million a seat, which is significantly cheaper than what the Russians wanted. But their cargo launches cost $60 million per launch
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That perhaps overstates Rockwell's role, but it certainly was a massive contract for them. And they milked it massively. Since it was cost-plus, if any other Rockwell project went overbudget, they just billed the hours to the Shuttle programme.
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Manned Space Travel... (Score:1)
Blue Danube (Score:2)
hell yeah (Score:1)
Well done, congratulations! (Score:2)
The Dragon crew just boarded the ISS and Mission Control is letting VIPs, and Ted Cruz, talk to the astronauts.