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2nd SpaceX Demo Flight Slated For Feb. 7
TheNextCorner writes with the news that "Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX)'s second Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) demonstration flight will be Feb. 7, 2012. Pending completion of final safety reviews, testing and verification, NASA also has agreed to allow SpaceX to send its Dragon spacecraft to rendezvous with the International Space Station (ISS) in a single flight." Update: 12/10 06:41 GMT by T : Reader BenJCarter adds a link to an L.A. Times article on the ISS rendezvous (with a great photo).
Let's hope it makes spaceflight affordable b4 I am too old to launch...
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. - Publius
23,000 pounds of payload into LEO (13,000 pounds if you don't count Dragon capsule itself)
That's damn cheap!
Sexy video at the bottom of the LA Times link. Everything looked very normal.. boring.. and exciting at the same time!
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Record a video before you leave which can be publicized widely in the event you're killed in the course of your mission. Make it very clear that you accepted the risks willingly, that your motives included the betterment of humanity, and that you felt they were important enough to die for them.
Make it clear that your death was no different in spirit than that of a random, forgotten pioneer who might have suffered from dysentery or Indian attacks or smallpox or whatever. Explain that robots cannot, in fact, do everything a human might usefully do in space; that this sort of shit sometimes happens; and that everybody should just deal with it and get over it, already.
In short, make it clear that you would be very angry if people were to use your death as an excuse to cripple and delay manned space exploration any more than it already has been.
Why leave a video? Because sooner or later, one of the private US-based launch efforts is going to kill one or more of its crew members. Strong men will cry on TV, flags will wave solemnly, Jesus will be praised, and America will enter its usual 10-years-of-sackcloth-and-ashes routine. Politicians will compete to see who can ban X, Y, or Z first. No further progress will be made because, fuck, man, somebody got killed the last time!
You need to tell everyone that this is a bullshit attitude. Remind them that if we have to wait until space travel is as safe as boarding an airplane in order to make any forward progress, we will end up in the same place we would've ended up in if we had insisted on delaying aeronautical research until flying was as safe as walking.
And since you're willing to post on the intarwebs, I've approved you to stick your head in a blender. The Dragon is currently unmanned and when it is finally used for manned space flight, not likely to send people to the ISS as part of that first mission.
Great post. Never forget that if the USA had given up after Apollo 1, you guess would never have gotten to the moon. Make them heroes to inspire, not cautionary tales to scare children and deter them from a lifetime of trying.
Elon Musk has also stated categorically that he will not be flying on the Dragon at any point in the near future... at least not until he is prepared to go into retirement from SpaceX and some of his other endeavors. His concern is if there is a mishap of some sort.... the company would go down with him. Yes, there might be somebody to take his spot in theory, but he is the main money man behind the company and is certainly setting the agenda for what SpaceX is doing.
As for what the destination of the first crewed version of the Dragon might be, I'd give it 50/50 odds that it would go to a Bigelow habitat instead of the ISS. I wish SpaceX would take things a little more carefully rather than trying to do the "all up" testing they seem to be striving for, but then again I'm not having to pay the $100 M+ of actual costs to build + fly the rocket.
I rather like the testing style of Armadillo Aerospace, but then again they are starting with much smaller rockets and have only recently been able to get to 100k feet. John Carmack also doesn't have Elon's budget either.
What makes you think that SpaceX aren't being careful? The all-up test is only the last testing step; it's preceded by the usual unit tests.
In fact SpaceX are being more careful than most; they've designed the Falcon 9 so that they can assemble the first stage, do a test fire and then launch that same first stage. I don't remember NASA doing such full-scale test runs on the Shuttle, for example.
NASA did do a full duration "Flight Readiness Firing" before each Shuttle lifted off for its first mission. Videos of them can even be found on Youtube.
Like Columbia's.
There's actually an example of that happening.
American Rocket was the hot ticket for a private space launch company in the 80s. Unfortunately, the main person behind the company, George Koopman was killed in an auto accident. They suffered a launch failure 3 months later and never were able to recover.
You're just a jealous, anti-American bean counter.
What do you have against $14-trillion debt, false flag operations across the world, stealing from the poor to give to the rich (bankers),....
Still... it does make you pause for a second. He will not fly on his own spaceship.
http://wwww.zerospeaks.com