SpaceX Successfully Launches Astronauts With a Re-Used Dragon Spacecraft for the First Time (techcrunch.com) 63
SpaceX has another successful human space launch to its credit, after a good takeoff and orbital delivery of its Crew Dragon spacecraft on Friday morning. From a report: The Dragon took off aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 5:49 AM EDT (2:49 AM EDT). On board were four astronauts, including NASA's Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough, as well as JAXA's Akihiko Hoshide and the ESA's Thomas Pesquet. This was Spacex's second official astronaut delivery mission for NASA, after its Crew-1 operation last year.
SpaceX has characterized the use of re-flown elements as arguably even safer than using new ones, with CEO Elon Musk noting that you wouldn't want to be on the "first flight of an airplane when it comes out of the factory" during a conversation with Xprize's Peter Diamandis on Thursday evening. Now that the Crew Dragon is in its target transfer orbit, it'll be making its way to rendezvous with the Space Station, which will take just under 24 hours. It'll be docking with the station early tomorrow morning, attaching to a docking port that was just cleared earlier this month when SpaceX's other Crew Dragon relocated to another port on the ISS earlier this month.
SpaceX has characterized the use of re-flown elements as arguably even safer than using new ones, with CEO Elon Musk noting that you wouldn't want to be on the "first flight of an airplane when it comes out of the factory" during a conversation with Xprize's Peter Diamandis on Thursday evening. Now that the Crew Dragon is in its target transfer orbit, it'll be making its way to rendezvous with the Space Station, which will take just under 24 hours. It'll be docking with the station early tomorrow morning, attaching to a docking port that was just cleared earlier this month when SpaceX's other Crew Dragon relocated to another port on the ISS earlier this month.
Good news needed these day? (Score:3, Insightful)
When I was little I remember watching the Apollo missions with awe on our black and white TV. Led me to have a great admiration for engineering and science and maybe an even greater admiration for the USA.
I still love engineering and science, but where is the US going?
I do hope, as a nation you can recover that open minded sense of optimism and "can do" that I used to associate with your country.
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Nope. Covid-19 telling them that. People want to work but that's hard to do when the business you work for is closed down. Checks just keep the problem from getting worse.*
*Note well that the US isn't the only one with a "check" program.
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Bet India doesn't agree with you.
Re: Good news needed these day? (Score:1)
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It will hurt the poor!
You will need to raise my taxes!
It will displace the endangered red bellied spotted swamp humper.
In general, it doesn't happen because people collectively choose not to because the change requires a form of social investment and/or would upset the powers that be's business plans.
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How tall is it 'possible' to make a skyscraper? It's a dumb question, because it's clearly not worth doing.
Feasibility is what matters 99.9% of the time. And feasibility means doing the thing for a cost that makes it worthwhile to do. And that is where tremendous progress is happening lately.
Well, that, and the fact that the expectations of exponential progress after the moon landing have died. We've
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But right now the politics of this country is telling everyone "You can't do... Let the government write you checks instead"
I'm not sure this applies to the space industry as ran by the government. The major issue with NASA "build contracts" is that those setting the budget are looking at the program as a jobs creator. The only problem is that there are 50 states and the Representatives of those 50 states are trying to use the program as a way to get jobs into their state at potentially the cost of jobs in another state. The bickering over which state gets which job causes priorities to constantly shift which in turn just dri
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No the government isn't saying that all.
The government is saying, we need to do more to help those who are currently stuck, because they are in a condition where they are in cases where they can't do.
Musk started Space X and Tesla with millions of dollars from being lucky with Paypal. He could afford to risk a lot of money without costing him the things he needs to survive. For the guy who is making 25k a year, spending 10% or even 5% of his income on long term investments can come at the cost of things
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I still love engineering and science, but where is the US going?
Uhh...to the ISS?
I mean with all those other nations out there in space, I guess you could have missed that little detail.
Re:Good news needed these day? (Score:5, Informative)
I mean although this seems mundane we are looking at a 2nd golden age of space exploration and science, so some things to be optimistic about:
- Several private ventures launching rockets successfully now
- USA has manned spacecraft operations again.
- Booster re-use is commonplace, at least for one company now.
- Space tourism is going to be a real thing next year with New Shepard and Virgin orbit commencing operations.
- Vulcan, Ariane-6, SLS all set to launch next year.
- Moon landing and possible base looks to be happening again in the next decade if sooner.
- We have a helicopter on Mar's right now
- Europa Clipper set to launch 2024 and get us even closer to finding possible life in our own system.
- James Webb telescope set to launch finally at some point soon.
- Actual satellite based internet becoming commonplace in the next couple years.
- Starship, if it stays on track, could put the largest, most important rocket since the Saturn V in orbit and probably on Mars within the decade.
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Left out aliens landing, asking to be taken to our leaders. Wondering why one of them has a book, "to serve man".
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Mars. There's no apostrophe in the planet's name. Of course, if you're actually talking about something belonging to Mar, my apologies....
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It's common courtesy to put an ' as a warning whenever an 's' is approaching.
You probably don't use your signal lights either. 'Savage.
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True, the people who turn on their signal lights two blocks before they turn are worse than the ones that don't use them at all.
Also, I love that I got a troll mod.
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I would want to see the longer term safety record of the Space X ships, before we declare a new golden age.
The shuttle was suppose to be the golden age, however it was too complex, while reusable it cost more to maintain than to build disposable rockets, and safety issues.
Space X has seemed to came up with a good solution... But I would say they will need some more success before we say we can be in a new golden age.
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The block-5 Falcon 9 is racking up a pretty good safety record so far with how often it gets used. It'll never get to Soyuz level of confidence, I doubt any platform will ever rack up that many flights again but pretty good. I would say it's almost to the level of "sure thing" as the Atlas-V/Ariane-5, but not quite yet. 2 or 3 more crewed missions and it will take that crown of modern rockets. Personally I would "feel" safer going to space on a F9 than the shuttle, it's just a much simpler machine.
Star
Re: Good news needed these day? (Score:2)
Helicopter on the moon IMO.
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Well, the lunar gateway concept is pretty cool. Another space station but this one in lunar orbit, and a kind of special one called the NRHO or Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit. From Earth looking at the Moon it'll always be within line of sight. No more communications blackout when the moon gets between you and Earth. Kind of a fun one because it uses the L2 (Lagrange point) gravity well to perturb the orbit just right so it's always lined up w
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One word: (Score:1)
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Second phrase. Used spacecraft.* :-p
*Better than, lowest bidder.
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Second phrase. Used spacecraft.
Makes perfect sense. As soon as you push it off the planet it loses 30% of its sell value. Wouldn't want to be the sucker to make that loss.
Really rubbing the salt in Boeing's wounds (Score:5, Insightful)
2nd manned flight, re-use of a capsule, successful recovery and landing, meanwhile Starliner is not set to launch again until September and it may not even hit that date.
Re: Really rubbing the salt in Boeing's wounds (Score:2)
Did you not know, we are super wealthy we can afford disposable rockets. We are so rich we can drive a Mercedes one time and throw it away. Oh, did I say we? Oops I meant we as in them, the politicians. They are wealthy with all the money they have forcefully taken into their command. So Boeing does not care, they hired enough Santa Claus politicians to keep giving them billions to waste on disposable rockets. If we built as many reusable rockets as have been wasted on disposable rockets, think of how big
Re: Really rubbing the salt in Boeing's wounds (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't agree with every decision NASA makes, and I don't like how much influence politicans have over their budget and directives (cough cough, Richard Shelby and SLS) but NASA has made some right moves. Commercial Crew was an Obama initiative and Musk himself has said SpaceX would not be where it is now without NASA funding. The fact that NASA had some amount of guts to pick SpaceX as the sole moon landing developer really shows the shifting dynamics in the organization, and Bill Nelson got in front of Congress and defended the decision this week.
Also NASA's budget is $24B. The Department of Defense budget was $721B in 2020, I think we can pull some wasted money far more efficiently out of that pie.
If you're mad about how politicians spend our money, elect better politicians.
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In NASA's defense, one concern is having only one provider to access LEO. We had the space shuttle but when something went wrong, everything was shut down while we figured out what happened and how to avoid it. After retiring the shuttles (a good thing), our only access was to ask the Russians. Currently, it's SpaceX. If something went wrong with a Dragon capsule, everything gets shut down while the investigation happens (again, a good thing). So by having two providers, if something happens, we can sh
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Yes I agree, but the $2.3 billion is for SpaceX to do the first landing. Bill Nelson said in his testimony to congress a few days ago that there will be follow up missions are there will be competition for those missions. I the $2.3 billion was split three ways there is a chance nobody would have succeeded because that's only $750 million for each one. With $2.3 billion to the company that is most likely to succeed, we ensure there is enough funding for a successful first mission.
Let's not forget Boeing has
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Apparently SpaceX was the only one that was willing to do it for anything remotely close to $2.3 billion too. You can see why. That probably wouldn't even cover the kickoff party at any of the standard military contractors.
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... meanwhile Starliner is not set to launch again until September and it may not even hit that date.
Well, late August is a possibility for OFT-2, but all dates more than a few months out are primarily placeholders waiting for other factors to settle. It seems likely that Boe-CFT will not launch this year (although that, too, has a placeholder for the 4th quarter of this year, but almost no one believes it will not be pushed out).
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Of course, to pick nits here, the second successful launch won't be nearly as impressive as the second successful landing.
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That is a very accurate point. If a plane crashes on landing no one says "but hey look at how well it got off the ground"
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Well, yes, and for a capsule, that's doubly true, given that an ablative heat shield by definition gets thinner and lighter every time it lands.
Dick move by the AP this morning (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Dick move by the AP this morning (Score:4, Insightful)
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This isn't bad taste, because its not an accident that AP archive posted it with a vague title and Google put it on loudspeaker just prior to the launch of Crew-2.
At some point people have to realize some things are done with malicious intent and not simply incompetence.
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AP is Fake News. QED.
I thought they weren't going to reuse them? (Score:5, Interesting)
Huh, I missed when NASA got the bug out of its butt for reusing the DragonX capsules. Previous word was that they'd only be used for crew use once, then be cargo after that. I'm glad that they managed to convince NASA to give full reuse a go.
Re:I thought they weren't going to reuse them? (Score:5, Funny)
They told NASA it was only flown by a little old lady who went to church on Sundays. Then they took them aside and said, "What do I have to do to get you in to this rocket?".
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> Huh, I missed when NASA got the bug out of its butt for reusing the DragonX capsules.
Weren't about 95% of Space Shuttle missions technically a "reuse of a previously flown spacecraft"?
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I believe they were enticed with a discount as well, but yup.. great move!
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When Starliner started missing their dates and NASA realized they'd have to move up the Crew-2 dates to keep coverage, it required a contract change. SpaceX came back and said "we'll move up the dates, but in return we'll get to reuse hardware from now on." NASA agreed.
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Boeing isn't ready with Starliner. They cannot pay more for SpaceX, but SpaceX is willing to move up their launch with a reused rocket and capsule. This is an arrangement that both can live with. If Boeing can get their act together, NASA wouldn't have to do this.
One astronaut reportedly complained (Score:4, Funny)
about the previous crew leaving candybar wrappers in the seat-back pouch. Another complained that the crossword puzzle had already been filled out in his flight manual.