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billvon

Congratulations SpaceX

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Congratulations to SpaceX for successfully docking their Dragon spacecraft with the ISS. It will be up there for about three weeks, after which it will detach, re-enter and land off the coast of California. It's designed to be man-rated, and hopefully further testing will allow it to be used to ferry both astronauts (7 at a time) and cargo to the ISS.

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My understanding from the new conference this morning was that hatch opening was early A.M. tomorrow (Saturday), most of the cargo transfer operations would occur Monday and Tuesday, and that undocking, deorbit, and splashdown would be later next week.

I think future missions will have a longer berthed duration, but that this demo flight was operating on an abbreviated timeline.

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Cool stuff. Let's hope commercial space ventures actually do drive both cost and human risk down, as proponents have been tauting.

Next on the list - a jump from outer space, in a pressurized wingsuit, and landing it without parachute in a pile of cardboard boxes.
Trapped on the surface of a sphere. XKCD

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Next on the list - a jump from outer space, in a pressurized wingsuit, and landing it without parachute in a pile of cardboard boxes.



:o:o
:D:D:D
My reality and yours are quite different.
I think we're all Bozos on this bus.
Falcon5232, SCS8170, SCSA353, POPS9398, DS239

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I'm not sure that human risk will be driven down by anything besides experience with what works and what doesn't. The gummint space program, for all its faults, spent an incredible amount of money focusing on safety; in some ways, I'd say it was considerably more risk-averse than a commercial enterprise would be.

Because, well, a commercial enterprise doesn't generally have to go testify in front of Congress when something risky goes wrong.

Don't get me wrong -- I think it's a good thing, because I think that too much of a focus on risk mitigation reduces the speed of development a lot. You don't want to go too far in either direction, of course.

In the long run, especially with multiple entities working on it, space travel will get safer. But there will still be accidents on the way.

Wendy P.
There is nothing more dangerous than breaking a basic safety rule and getting away with it. It removes fear of the consequences and builds false confidence. (tbrown)

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I think this is great news. And I agree with Quade - that this is much more than the glamor of the suborbital passenger flights and is some hardcore space engineering.

SpaceX is meeting the standard. Successful launch. Rendezvous. Docking. And it will carry stuff back. Great stuff.

And I'm looking forward to seeing what other companies can do. There's just something about SpaceX and the ambition of Elon Musk - not just developing the vehicle for use on existing booster platforms but developing their own booster. I think it's great!


My wife is hotter than your wife.

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I do think that Dragon has a few better ideas than the Orion program was coming up with. My favorite is the lack of the external ejection motors. Everything from Gemini to Apollo to Orion was looking to use an external motor to lift the capsule away from the rocket body if needed for an escape situation. The issue with that is that if everything goes normal then you have to still get rid of that external fixture in order to continue to orbit since the parachutes are sitting right under it. No matter what route good/bad you had to add that extra step into the process to get to the next point. SpaceX eliminated that and said why not just use basically the control motors to lift it up and away in an emergency? That reduces one more step from launch and therefore cost from the equation. This simple change also increases the safety factor since you don't have to rely on the external rockets to be discarded in either situation because if you had a good launch and the external failed to leave you are unable to land the craft.
Yesterday is history
And tomorrow is a mystery

Parachutemanuals.com

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>SpaceX eliminated that and said why not just use basically the control
>motors to lift it up and away in an emergency?

The Dragon uses eight separate engines for launch abort; they're not the same as the maneuvering thrusters. (The thrusts required for both are orders of magnitude different.) Good because it eliminates a step in the launch sequence; bad because you have to lift all that mass to orbit and then return with it, and that's mass you can't use for cargo/passengers.

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bad because you have to lift all that mass to orbit and then return with it, and that's mass you can't use for cargo/passengers.



The Apollo escape system rocket itself had a mass of about 9k-10k pounds. The Command Module for Apollo had a mass of 12k-13k pounds. While the Apollo escape rocket was jettisoned during the second stage burn, it still constituted some pretty considerable mass to be lifted - even if it was only to about 50 miles.

So there's that tradeoff, too. But apparently SpaceX is looking at the launch abort thrusters as being multifunctional. They are developing the SuperDraco engines for it - which are hypergolic (simple and reliable) and throttleable - not only as an abort option but also as a descent/ascent motor.

Considering that they don't appear to be looking at any other complementary vehicle, anyone see anything indicating potential plans for a direct ascent mission to the moon or asteroid in the coming years?


My wife is hotter than your wife.

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3 of the young jumpers at my dz work at spacex in tx. In fact I gave the a license oral quiz today to the guy who was in charge of signing off on the thrusters :). I was joking about photoshopping a skydive temple bumper sticker onto one of the photos, and he assured me once it lands it will be coming back to Texas and he can put one on for real :). So look for skydiving stickers the next launch !! Laugh

It is cool - I drove up to their location a couple times and got to watch test fires of their engines from a couple hundred yards away. Saw the rocket before it launched. Was told I could come up once it's back and check it out and I definitely will. It's very cool.

We are going to have to work on them on implementing an emergency bailout systems for which they will need test jumpers:)

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3 of the young jumpers at my dz work at spacex in tx. In fact I gave the a license oral quiz today to the guy who was in charge of signing off on the thrusters :).

We are going to have to work on them on implementing an emergency bailout systems for which they will need test jumpers:)



I think you may be training said 'test jumpers' right now. :)

Don't tell me the sky's the limit when there are footprints on the moon

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Congratulations to SpaceX for successfully docking their Dragon spacecraft with the ISS. It will be up there for about three weeks, after which it will detach, re-enter and land off the coast of California. It's designed to be man-rated, and hopefully further testing will allow it to be used to ferry both astronauts (7 at a time) and cargo to the ISS.

Same. I've been keeping an eye on space news almost every day for years.

Keep it up. They need to avoid disasters for the next few launches to strengthen their launch manifest! Add to that, Bigelow, Virgin America, Blue Origin, and many other endeavours. But SpaceX is ahead of the pack right now, with actual business and a real manifest.

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"Dragon's de-orbit burn is set for 10:51 a.m. EDT, setting up the spacecraft to plunge back into Earth's atmosphere at 17,000 mph, flying from northwest to southeast over the North Pacific before deploying drogue parachutes and main chutes.

Dragon will also jettison its trunk, an unpressurized section which houses the craft's solar panels, at 11:09 a.m. EDT (1509 GMT). The trunk will burn up in the atmosphere. The craft's Draco thrusters will periodically fire during re-entry to refine Dragon's trajectory to reach the desired landing zone in the Eastern Pacific Ocean.

The capsule's drogue stabilization parachutes will deploy at an altitude of 45,000 feet at 11:35 a.m. EDT (1535 GMT). Three 116-foot main parachutes will unfurl 10,000 feet above the water at 11:36 a.m. EDT (1536 GMT)."

"Once we got to the point where twenty/something's needed a place on the corner that changed the oil in their cars we were doomed . . ."
-NickDG

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Congratulations to SpaceX for successfully docking their Dragon spacecraft with the ISS. It will be up there for about three weeks, after which it will detach, re-enter and land off the coast of California. It's designed to be man-rated, and hopefully further testing will allow it to be used to ferry both astronauts (7 at a time) and cargo to the ISS.



My last project at NASA prior to leaving (Laid off) was to design the Bundles that secured the Flight Releasable Grapple Fixtures (FRGFs) together. Well I say design, more of reverse engineer SpaceX design to a working mockup that could be used in training astronauts in the underwater environment of the Neutral Buoyancy Lab at Sonny Carter Training Facility.

A brilliant engineering buddy of mine was hired away from NASA by SpaceX to handle all Structural Analysis and Finite Element Analysis among otherthings. It is said that he is on the short list as being one of SpaceX's future Astronauts.

Congrats to you Jeff.:)

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Well, it was pretty much pointless to watch NASATV. We did get to see some of the descent and canopy flight even though the video was atrocious and then we missed the spash-down but instead got to watch the SPACEX control room people picking their noses.
*shaking head*
My reality and yours are quite different.
I think we're all Bozos on this bus.
Falcon5232, SCS8170, SCSA353, POPS9398, DS239

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Well, it was pretty much pointless to watch NASATV. We did get to see some of the descent and canopy flight even though the video was atrocious and then we missed the spash-down but instead got to watch the SPACEX control room people picking their noses.
*shaking head*



I think the issue was the Dragon was returning in the role of Trash Can. Bringing home the garbage is an important part of the testing phase. NASATV is somewhat boring on most accassions.

Any word on the Red Bull Stratos project. What is the scheduled time of the jump? Now that is womething I don't want to miss

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