SpaceX Developing Orbital Crew Capsule

iamlucky13 writes "Private aerospace firm SpaceX has revealed that it has secretly been working on a crew and cargo vehicle since late 2004. Development of the capsule, named Dragon, has so far been funded by SpaceX and its partners, which includes the Canadian company that built the robotic arm for the International Space Station. Dragon would be launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 and dock at the ISS with assistance of the robotic arm. While SpaceX founder Elon Musk is prepared to complete development of the capsule with his own resources, SpaceX is seeking funding from NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, which makes up to $500 million available through 2010 for private spacecraft development."

Comments

Re:Slightly OT: Kerosene?

[cmowire]

Kerosene is not the most efficent, in terms of mass, but it is rather efficent in terms of density. It's rather much like jet fuel, so there's already hardware to deal with it.

Hydrogen is more efficent in terms of mass, but it's not very dense, so you need huge tanks to store it. Also, it's cold enough to give you nasty materials problems that you don't get with just LOX.

So usually it makes more sense to use kerosene + LOX on the first stage because you are going to need a lot of fuel and you are going to have to push it through the atmosphere and stuff. Then once you are above the atmosphere and have ejected the first stage, the rest of the stages work better with hydrogen as the fuel.