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How NASA and SpaceX Get Along Together
mblase writes "SpaceX and NASA have been working hard to make this weekend's launch happen — and that has meant navigating the cultural differences between this small, young startup and the huge veteran space agency. The relationship involves daily calls and emails between people who live in two different worlds: age versus youth, bureaucracy versus a flat startup-like structure, and a sense of caution versus a desire to move forward quickly. But they both have an almost religious belief in the need for humans to venture forth into space, a geeky love for rockets, and technical know-how — plus, they both need each other to succeed."
The launch is scheduled for 4:55AM EDT (08:55 GMT) tomorrow morning. NASA TV will begin coverage at 3:30AM EDT, and there will be a press conference at 8:30AM. SpaceX's press kit (PDF) has mission details. The rendezvous with the ISS is scheduled for day 4 of the mission after a series of maneuvering tests to ensure the Dragon capsule can approach safely. It carries 1,200 pounds of supplies for the people aboard the ISS, and it carries 11 science experiments designed by students.
One-half of one penny of every tax dollar. That's what the NASA budget is. We spend an assload more money on trying to kill people than we do planning for the future of the human race. On top of the measly NASA budget, we still have to outsource most of our space program.
Did you know the US spends more on the military's Air Conditioners than the entire NASA budget? http://gizmodo.com/5813257/air-conditioning-our-military-costs-more-than-nasas-entire-budget.
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I don't think that many austronauts are Linux tinkerers.
Intercept orbit to the ISS dictates launch window. Changing the obit of the ISS, to allow the launch during prime-time would require tremendous amounts of fuel on the ISS, and a tremendous sense of humor on someone's part.
Go buy Kerbal Space Program, get a ship in orbit, then launch a second one to go chase after the first ship in orbit. Even if your launches are only a few hours apart, it's difficult to match orbit (speeding up to "catch up" with the ISS causes your orbit to go all egg shaped).
I've been playing that damn game for about 3 weeks now and I have yet to successfully complete an orbital rendezvous. Matching orbits is hard. Space is hard. If this shit were free and easy, North Korea would have a manned space station already.
NASA makes it look easy, but the fact of the matter is you've got objects zipping through low earth orbit at tens of thousands (17,500 mph generally), and if you're off by "only" 500mph, well, hope you're not on a collision course with the station. Imagine roughly the same result of your car hitting a brick wall at 500mph.
TL;DR you've got to launch that shit when you have to, no ifs, ands, or buts. Apollo moon missions don't have a rendezvous element so they had the option of launching during prime time.
moox. for a new generation.
Sorry, they don't have a linux client, so no sale. It does look interesting, so if I can get the demo to work in wine maybe I will buy it.
I beg to differ, I thing we can be and *are* far more stupid than the British.
Well, obviously they did have a rendezvous element, it's just that the target wasn't moving terribly fast (relatively speaking) and there was a valid launch window more or less every day.
There was a valid launch window every once in a while, because they had to arrive at their landing site early in the lunar morning so that their entire stay was during the lunar day and, I believe, so that the sun was still low so it they wouldn't exceed LEM cooling margins.
They were somewhat flexible in launch time during that window because they would spend some time in orbit around the moon before landing, so if they had to pick a launch window an hour or two earlier than the ideal because of other constraints, they could potentially wait a few orbits before the landing.
If you look up the NASA documents on Apollo launch planning there were a number of constraints they had to work within. Unfortunately I can't remember them all :).
and now that is almost half-owned by foreign companies.
One of the main goals of the COTS program is to use U.S. companies for LEO cargo and crew capability. Right now, we're completely dependent on Russia, EU, and Japan for crew and cargo launches to ISS.
And it's not about just privatizing a lot of space stuff. It's really more about (IMHO) pushing the "frontier" for NASA to be responsible for exploration out beyond LEO, and let LEO get commercialized.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
They really don't have other days to try and perform this launch either. The Kennedy Space Center and the Cape Canaveral Air Station (a USAF base) is a very busy place with a great many launches happening going to a great many places being done by a great many different companies and people. Some of those other launches simply can't wait, and in fact are a higher priority to this launch by SpaceX (as they contain weather satellites, various military satellites, GPS satellites, and other things important for America as well).
Your ignorance is showing even more for posing this question at all. Besides, there is no reason for this launch to happen at a time convenient for you to be able to eat your breakfast and take in a bit of entertainment. This is rocket science.
But more to the point, there won't be days in the near future that would allow a launch window between 9 am and 9 pm and meet all of the other conditions needed for this flight as well as dealing with everything else that needs to happen at this launch site. Of all of the things that these engineers should be worrying about, your need for sleep is the last consideration they should have.
The real news here is that NASA is conceding the idea that launches into low-Earth orbit are now routine enough that they really shouldn't be spending money on building rockets going there. This is a very recent admission that has only happened under the Obama administration.
What will likely not be mentioned is how a great many other companies are also involved with this effort of having NASA get rid of its native launch capacity, or how nearly $20 billion is currently being spent on a heavy lift rocket that has no mission and will likely be cancelled in the next presidential administration (whomever that may be... in 2013 or 2017 of either political party). The other companies that are involved at the moment is really exciting, and shows amazing potential for America being a real leader in developing technologies for spaceflight.
The hope and dream of many people here is that travel into low-Earth orbit will become something as routine as sending passengers and cargo on intercontinental flights by airplane. There was a time that deservedly justified 40 point type headlines in newspapers, just as early flights into orbit did several decades later. The sad thing is how long it took for routine intercontinental flights to happen compared to when the first such flights happened, and then how long it is taking from when the first flights to low-Earth orbit happened to when they've become routine. As evidenced by the fact this is a major story and posted here in Slashdot, flights into orbit still aren't routine. That can and should change.
I don't know about THIS case, but I know that when they were planning shuttle launches last summer, the daily landing window for a landing in Florida was approximately 10 minutes, and shifted by about 10 minutes per day. I believe there are technically launch windows every 50 or 70 minutes, but they have to commit to one before the countdown begins. In other words, they can't shoot for a 5am launch, miss it due to a rainstorm, and try again an hour later. If the planned launch window passes, they call the whole thing off, empty the tanks, dispose of the fuel and liquid oxygen, and basically plan several days to restore everything to pristine virgin condition. Mainly, because SpaceX can't afford (politically or otherwise) to have anything go wrong. If there's even the slightest doubt in their minds that the launch will be a complete success, it's not going to launch. 5 years from now, if their launch schedule is full and they have more business than they can handle, they might go a step beyond NASA and start experimentally launching unmanned rockets during inclement weather to see how much impact it really, truly has on launch safety.
Anyway, a predawn LAUNCH isn't really a problem, because the rocket will light up the sky for 20 miles. It's predawn LANDINGS that used to suck, because unlike a launch, a shuttle landing before dawn was basically invisible to the naked eye.
They set up a private viewing area on the causeway, but nothing big, and I doubt that the visitor complex is doing anything. Their rocket is tiny compared to shuttle, or Delta IV or Atlas V even, and while fun, it's a tiny bottle rocket. Their first launch compared to Delta II launches if anything, neat but nothing to write home about. You get what you pay for in this case, about 9 million pounds of thrust for shuttle, 7 Million for Saturn V, 2 million for Delta IV heavy And Atlas V, and around 800k pounds for Delta II and Falcon 9.