SpaceX Launches a Billionaire To Conduct the First Private Spacewalk (apnews.com) 76
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: A daredevil billionaire rocketed back into orbit Tuesday, aiming to perform the first private spacewalk and venture farther than anyone since NASA's Apollo moonshots. Unlike his previous chartered flight, tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman shared the cost with SpaceX this time around, which included developing and testing brand new spacesuits to see how they'll hold up in the harsh vacuum. If all goes as planned, it will be the first time private citizens conduct a spacewalk, but they won't venture away from the capsule. Considered one of the riskiest parts of spaceflight, spacewalks have been the sole realm of professional astronauts since the former Soviet Union popped open the hatch in 1965, closely followed by the U.S. Today, they are routinely done at the International Space Station.
Isaacman, along with a pair of SpaceX engineers and a former Air Force Thunderbirds pilot, launched before dawn aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. The spacewalk is scheduled for Thursday, midway through the five-day flight. But first the passengers are shooting for way beyond the International Space Station -- an altitude of 870 miles (1,400 kilometers), which would surpass the Earth-lapping record set during NASA's Project Gemini in 1966. Only the 24 Apollo astronauts who flew to the moon have ventured farther. The plan is to spend 10 hours at that height -- filled with extreme radiation and riddled with debris -- before reducing the oval-shaped orbit by half. Even at this lower 435 miles (700 kilometers), the orbit would eclipse the space station and even the Hubble Space Telescope, the highest shuttle astronauts flew.
All four wore SpaceX's spacewalking suits because the entire Dragon capsule will be depressurized for the two-hour spacewalk, exposing everyone to the dangerous environment. Isaacman and SpaceX's Sarah Gillis will take turns briefly popping out of the hatch. They'll test their white and black-trimmed custom suits by twisting their bodies. Both will always have a hand or foot touching the capsule or attached support structure that resembles the top of a pool ladder. There will be no dangling at the end of their 12-foot (3.6-meter) tethers and no jetpack showboating. Only NASA's suits at the space station come equipped with jetpacks, for emergency use only.
Isaacman, along with a pair of SpaceX engineers and a former Air Force Thunderbirds pilot, launched before dawn aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. The spacewalk is scheduled for Thursday, midway through the five-day flight. But first the passengers are shooting for way beyond the International Space Station -- an altitude of 870 miles (1,400 kilometers), which would surpass the Earth-lapping record set during NASA's Project Gemini in 1966. Only the 24 Apollo astronauts who flew to the moon have ventured farther. The plan is to spend 10 hours at that height -- filled with extreme radiation and riddled with debris -- before reducing the oval-shaped orbit by half. Even at this lower 435 miles (700 kilometers), the orbit would eclipse the space station and even the Hubble Space Telescope, the highest shuttle astronauts flew.
All four wore SpaceX's spacewalking suits because the entire Dragon capsule will be depressurized for the two-hour spacewalk, exposing everyone to the dangerous environment. Isaacman and SpaceX's Sarah Gillis will take turns briefly popping out of the hatch. They'll test their white and black-trimmed custom suits by twisting their bodies. Both will always have a hand or foot touching the capsule or attached support structure that resembles the top of a pool ladder. There will be no dangling at the end of their 12-foot (3.6-meter) tethers and no jetpack showboating. Only NASA's suits at the space station come equipped with jetpacks, for emergency use only.
Rich people in spaaaaace (Score:4, Funny)
It's a nice start, now can we send the rest of the billionaires and leave them there?
I kid, I kid.
Re: Rich people in spaaaaace (Score:1)
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otoh he's also the only one paying for his own seat. ;-)
also btw, billionaires? love 'em or hate 'em, they're much rarer than aerospace engineers. make of that as you will.
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I really doubt the others have any objection to bringing along the guy who paid for their seats.
Likewise, if the anonymous coward didn't post, how would you have replied?
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I have a pretty hard time imagining what that level of wealth would even be like, since as it is I spend a lot of time coming up with ways of doing things in the most frugal means possible.
That being said, I doubt I'd want to take a space trip even for free. There's still too much potential for things to go wrong, and I also don't particularly like the idea of being in the limelight either. Though, if space flights were cheap enough that anyone could take them, that certainly would eliminate the whole fam
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and Plutocrats to Pluuuto!
Re:One of the billionaires was basically killed (Score:4, Informative)
by her cybertruck.
"she accidentally reversed the Model X SUV into a pond"
That fancy glass that they're so proud of because it'll save you from Antifa looks cool and all, but there's a reason your car's glass is breakable, it's so if you end up in water you've got a chance to kick out the glass and escape. She didn't, and drowned.
Three times the legal alcohol limit. Called a friend and talked for 8 minutes. Responding officers found the car completely submerged, broke the glass and got her out. They were too late.
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"she accidentally reversed the Model X SUV into a pond"
She had the silly thing in reverse... [youtube.com]
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I have one of those glass breaking jobbers in my car so I don't have to do it myself. Seems like if you have a Deplorean you need a titanium axe or something
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Steel is harder than titanium
Yes, but it's too heavy for the kind of people who buy cybercucks^W^W^W^W^Wtrucks
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but there's a reason your car's glass is breakable, it's so if you end up in water
Seriously? It's breakable because...it's glass. It's glass because...you can see through it. By law, it's also harder to break than most glass. I'm sure you've encountered this when you've tried to kick in a car window to feed your crack addiction and your foot just bounced off of it. And yet the same didn't happen when you kicked in a house window for the same reason, instead your leg just got cut really bad.
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The windshield, though, has got extra plastic stuff laminated in it, so it's quite resilient. In the junkyard, I saw a totaled car with its front smashed in. The windshield had a bloody "outdent" in it, in the shape and size of a human head. With all that force, the windshield didn't shatter.
Re: One of the billionaires was basically killed (Score:1)
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SpaceX doing what US government should have been doing for the past 40 years. Instead they squandered money on pointless wars.
Noting that SpaceX gets a *ton* of money from the US government in contracts for services -- so the US Government kinda *is* doing this.
As far as the wars go, the people voted in the politicians who authorized and pursued them ...
Re:Private sector (Score:5, Interesting)
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Trump is the only president in decades that didn't started a new military conflict. No matter how disappointed you are about that, it's true. Maybe if you have a good cry, you'll get over your TDS, but I doubt it.
Re:Private sector (Score:4, Informative)
Other than Trump and Carter, I can't think of presidents that were explicitly anti-war regardless of party.
Trump isn't anti-war. He just didn't see any way to make money from war during his term.
Trump has been explicit in his belief that the US gets into to too many wars it has no business in. He made it policy to begin withdrawing from the World Policeman thing, and enforced it. Even when he authorized the airstrke in Syria over the chemical attack, he insisted on getting US forces out of Syria as soon as practicable, to the point where where both neocons and liberals criticized him for not going to war with Syria. We live in strange times now when a Republican president wants the US out of foreign wars and progressive groups are allied with NatSoc/MIC interests in demanding the military be an occupational force across the world in the name of "stability". [americanprogress.org].
Re: Private sector (Score:2)
Re:Private sector (Score:5, Informative)
SpaceX doing what US government should have been doing for the past 40 years. Instead they squandered money on pointless wars.
Noting that SpaceX gets a *ton* of money from the US government in contracts for services -- so the US Government kinda *is* doing this.
In the same sense that the government paid for your car when you bought a Ford, because the government also buys a lot of Fords. SpaceX is a profitable company that is making money on this flight; there is no government funding involved, direct or indirect. All of the money the government put into SpaceX has been repaid in the form of avoided costs of Soyuz launches.
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SpaceX doing what US government should have been doing for the past 40 years. Instead they squandered money on pointless wars.
Noting that SpaceX gets a *ton* of money from the US government in contracts for services -- so the US Government kinda *is* doing this.
In the same sense that the government paid for your car when you bought a Ford, because the government also buys a lot of Fords. SpaceX is a profitable company that is making money on this flight; there is no government funding involved, direct or indirect. All of the money the government put into SpaceX has been repaid in the form of avoided costs of Soyuz launches.
Good points, not disputing them, but there is more than one way for the government to pursue something other than directly itself. The US Government pays SpaceX for ongoing services and development. etc ... On the other hand, many burdens NASA has are requirements/ restrictions placed on it by Congress -- specifically, the Senate. This more political than governmental.
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costs of Soyuz launches.
Which I'm glad we're less dependent on, what with Russia still being busy on day 929 of their 3 day special military operation, that we're sanctioning them over and helping oppose.
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Just out of curiosity, how many missiles do you think the US would allow someone to hit our cities with, before, uh, teaching them the error of their ways? Because if I remember right, we nearly launched a nuclear war over Cuba merely having weapons in our general vicinity.
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Well, I have some reservations about it, but the last time the US had their citizens being attacked (possibly as a response to ever more settlements), the indians were rounded up and put on reservations. Apparently this inspired a guy called Hitler.
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NASA has been doing so since its beginning. Most of the Apollo mission was built by various aerospace contractors. The problem is that when space-flight was new, everything was experimental or one-off so there wasn't enough consistency for "rent a ride" kind of arrangements. The retirement of the Shuttle and Putin's shenanigans made commercially viable contracted transport feasible. Reuse technology also improved.
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I disagree.
The problem is that Congress stuck their overly-large noses into it and started dictating rocket science to the actual rocket scientists.
That's how we got SLS, and why NASA doesn't have any money to spend on more useful things.
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Congress has been in NASA's decision chain forever. Every congressional district wants a NASA presence - good Federal jobs come with those.
Wanna know why the first space shuttle blew up?
The boosters were manufactured by Morton Thiokol in Utah, and barged to Florida in segments that could be transported.
Back when the Air Force wanted to run its own shuttles out of Vandenberg, they were going to make boosters on base, in one piece.
No segments, no o-rings, and lighter to boot - their shuttle would have had a s
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SpaceX doing what US government should have been doing for the past 40 years. Instead they squandered money on pointless wars.
Yep. And just like anyone in the private sector the company is doing a good job of destroying the environment [nbcnews.com] and lying about it [yahoo.com].
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That's why inheritance is a thing.
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Fantastic Four!
Now in Live Action!
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The four combined have 7 children...one of them might miss a parent. Spouses? Their own parents perhaps? Extended family? Friends? Those that have had interactions with four highly educated, active and successful people?
Somehow I expect each one of these people have positively touched more lives than Mr. Slashdot Edgelord.
Currently going to max apogee (Score:5, Informative)
going as far away from Earth for human since Apollo, and above the usual layer of Van Allen belt. After they achieved that, they'll purge nitrogen from the cabinet to go to a high oxygen to accumulate to what their space suit will be in. Once that's done, they'll don the space suit, pressurize it, and then depressurize the cabinet for space walk. Once the spacewalk is complete, the hatch will close and the vehicle re-pressurized. This is essentially what Gemini IV did.
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Haaaar! nice one
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That's what all the Gemini spacewalks did (except for the nitro purge -- they used a pure O2 environment).
It's also what was done for the LM (again, except the nitro purge).
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I mean... isn't this the crux of self-insurance?
We plebes have to pay out the nose for auto insurance, presumably because of the burden on society placed by those who operate motor vehicles on public roadways who don't carry insurance. That is, unless you can demonstrate that you have sufficient assets to self-insure.
Something similar happens with homeowners insurance. Those of us who don't own our homes outright carry mortgages. The mortgage company, refuses to pay to insure the asset that the mortgage
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The jealousy is strong with this one...
Okay, but ... (Score:2)
SpaceX Launches a Billionaire ...
It was the wrong billionaire.
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There is no wrong one, just an ordering preference.
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It's never a wrong billionaire. Otherwise they wouldn't be one.
Something that I wonder. (Score:2)
It's bigger than Apollo, but it's still not a very big ship. You're up there for 5 days, with your 3 colleagues. Let's say on day 1, last night's lasagna starts banging on the door, wanting out.
What? Do you sit in it for the better part of a week? Are you diapered up, plugged in, have a butt-hatch, un-suit or what? No matter what, you're gonna know your billionaire pal intimately by the end of the trip.
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Nah, they eat military MREs from the 80's and 90's for a week before going up. You won't shit for weeks after eating those for a few days. (I know, I spent 3 months eating them in the Persian Gulf until an actual chow hall was set up).
Re: Something that I wonder. (Score:2)
Dragon has a toilet. While theyâ(TM)re in the EVA suits, acclimating our space walking, yes, theyâ(TM)re wearing nappies.
Kinda Expensive to Get Rid of Them, Aint it? (Score:2)
Bit of a dickish way to describe a charity flight. (Score:5, Informative)
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A bit gullible to buy the 'charity' spin. He's doing it for himself.
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can't blame him (Score:1)
Well for them (Score:2)