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At Long Last, a Private Cargo Spaceship Takes Off (Video)
Tuesday morning at 0344, right on schedule (and it had to be right on schedule), Elon Musk's baby finally left the launch pad on its way to the International Space Station (ISS). Two babies, actually: the Falcon 9 launch vehicle is what we watched as it took off from Cape Canaveral -- the first private spaceship headed for the ISS -- with the Dragon spacecraft perched on its nose. The Dragon carried over 1000 pounds of supplies and experiments for the ISS. The launch went off without a hitch. But don't stop holding your breath quite yet; Dragon isn't scheduled to dock at the ISS until Friday.
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After watching both this and Copenhagen Suborbital's launch, I noticed that the rockets seem to "pop" at a few Hz. I don't recall hearing this on NASA launches, does anyone know why this is?
Scotty is on board.
One Rocket, TWO takeoffs!
I'm assuming the noise is more due to the mic cutting out than actual sound that the rocket made. Are there mics that can capture the roar, so it can be played back in DTS? :)
Someone get Timothy a proper lavaliere rig and nice in-ear monitors (if he really needs it).
Audio-Technica and Etymotic... call it maybe $500 and you'll be gtg for years.
Shut the fuck up, dufus.
But don't stop holding your breath quite yet
...the lawyers wanted us to pass on that they advise against issuing this command to your online minions.
Someone had to do it.
A commenter on NPR today made an interesting point. There is a lot of talk about "first private..." but NASA has relied heavily on private industry since the beginning. Lockheed Martin, Morton Thaikol, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, Rockwell Colllins, Teledyne, Honeywell, Kodak, Perkin-Elmer.........
And Falcon launched from a government built/owned/maintained launch-site.
What *is* different is the accounting. Instead of a bevy of cost-plus contracts there is now a single-point fixed-cost provider which, surprise surprise, seems to be able to deliver at a much lower cost/kg.
And no, this does not detract from their accomplishment. Getting to space is still difficult and risky. Congratulations to everyone involved regardless of who writes their paychecks.
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
"At Long Last, a Private Cargo Spaceship..."
Uhh, didn't all the money come from NASA???
From a layman's perspective, I'm confused as to why it takes so long to get to LEO? How fast does this compare with the space shuttle? Why does it take so long to dock?
Not bad. That's the way to do video.
Tsk Tsk for slashdot of all places to embed video that's not at least compatible with downloadhelper so one can download the video and watch it on a decent screen without strbuffering: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMu_x7zcTrs
For the minority of /. readers who care about the details, I highly recommend downloading the COTS 2 Press Kit from SpaceX.
It provides tons of details and graphics describing the mission objectives, schedule, cargo manifest, vehicle specs, and much more...
http://www.spacex.com/downloads/COTS-2-Press-Kit-5-14-12.pdf
(I am not affiliated with SpaceX, but I like what they are doing)
hey guys Nice Fucking Video!!!
Nothing is like watching a rocket launch at night. fantastic experience.
Slashdot needs to hire someone who knows how to edit video!
sarcasm meter seems to be suffering some sort of malfunction there.
"You need to have the Adobe Flash Player to view this content." /.? Ahhhhh...
Still no HTML5 on
I know you think you'e being clever, but the fact is that NASA worked very hard to prevent any private development of space flight capabilities for several decades.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
My kingdom for a mod point...
+6 Truth
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. ~ Douglas Adams
Agreed - and also not much to transcribe as a result.
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Title: "Fourth Time's a Charm" - The SpaceX Falcon Finally Gets Off the Ground
Description: It's been a long time coming, but a private spaceship is finally heading for the International Space Station. Yay!
00:00 TITLE
A shot of Timothy Lord in front of the countdown clock at Cape Canaveral is shown.
00:00) Countdown voice guy
7 minutes
00:01) Timothy
As you can see from the countdown clock behind me, it's now just under 7 minutes until the historic SpaceX launch to the International Space Station is set to happen.
Hopefully, we won't have any engine glitches this time, and it will actually go off.
00:12) TITLE
The SlashdotTV title sequence fades into view. It reads:
Timothy Lord, reporting
from Cape Canaveral, Florida
00:18) TITLE
The view changes to that of the Falcon 9 rocket at its final countdown stages. The Video is credited as: (NASA video clip)
00:17) Countdown voice guy
5... 4... 3... 2.. 1... 0.
Aaand launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, as NASA turns to the private sector to resupply the International Spac Station.
00:33) TITLE
Various shots of the rocket's progression are shown from hereon without specific commentary outside of that of the control room with the background noise being the roaring rumble of the Falcon 9 rocket.
01:45) TITLE
The image mixes and changes to a view of the control room with personnel carefully watching the mission and congratulating each other on the successful launch, before the rocket's progression is shown once more.
02:47) TITLE
The view fades slowly back to that of Timothy Lord on the grounds at Cape Canaveral.
02:47) Timothy
The Falcon 9 lift vehicle has now done its job.
It's much more to the Dragon capsule's mission before it can deliver its half ton of supplies, and must go through an elaborate sequence of moves to approach, and then dock with, the ISS itself.
02:57) TITLE
The view changes back to the Falcon 9 rocket as it ascents further into space.
02:57) Timothy
That docking is slated for Friday.
03:13) TITLE
The view of the Falcon 9 rocket fades out as the SlashdotTV logo fades in.
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Although I think the editing is not in-sequence. A few shots of the 'close-up' of the engine with little plumage are shown spliced between shots where the rocket's exhaust is unmistakable. The live stream I watched showed the engine close-up fairly late into the launch.
I also do wish they had included, or were able to include (perhaps that's SpaceX's property, rather than government?) footage of the solar panel deployment. The control room crew were much, much more excited about that then they were about the successful launch - to the point of one of the control room people on audio breaking her calm demeanor in announcing telemetry data and practically giggled. It was really great hearing that, and the elation that followed, in the audio.
On the other hand, it's cool seeing the control room shots in this video - I don't remember seeing those in the stream I watched. Quite different from what one might expect.
Source material to back up this claim?
If it had been left to the private sector, we'd wouldn't have got to the moon, mars, the heliosheath. And despite the fact that earth orbit is profitable, probably no private sector project would have made the investment or taken the risk to go to space at all.
Space X can only do what it's doing now because it's standing on the shoulders of previous public sector projects. And heck this very project is being paid for by the public sector.
I understand that one-sentence refutes and counters without evidence are commonplace on slashdot, so while I am intrigued, I will be somewhat apprehensive until you support that statement.
You're probably right, so would it really hurt to provide a few supporting links and some more information to help the rest of us out here that don't know what you know?
I don't see SpaceX coughing up the $$$ to rebuild the ISS if they crash into it during the docking procedure.
SpaceX has come a long way. I believe this launch will go down in history. Great job!
And private industry worked very hard to prevent any meaningful development of NASA's space flight capabilities.
Ok, so they were really working for as much of they could of the money from the government, it had the same effect.
+5 Interesting? If I said the previous Pope worked very hard to prevent any private development of space flight capabilities for several decades, and provided as much evidence as he did, would I be modded up too?
Now that I think about it, I'd be modded up by fundamentalist Christians, just like he was modded up by fundamentalist Libertarians. The only thing I like about the first is the funny hats, so could you guys get Ron Paul to wear one?
One last thing: private companies have been developing space stuff for decades. Or you think Boeing wouldn't be interested in the contracts?
No but we are realist. If we can get the privatised military industrial complex to focus on privatised space exploration instead, millions of people wont have to pointlessly die in fabricated wars. So although the privatisation of space exploration will inevitably be chaotic and many people will die in space and on the ground (privatisation doing it on the cheap and falling to the ground all over the place) overall we will all still be far better off. All they need is lotteries for a space trip so the cheetos crowd can get in on it, as well as most of the rest of us and we are set. A bit of space exploration competition wouldn't go astray either as least three competing groups would be great.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Wow, two launches in one day. That's amaz..
Nevermind.
Prior to the Challenger disaster in 1986, NASA had grabbed the entire space market in the US. Private companies couldn't launch payloads on rockets other than the Shuttle. And there's a long history of NASA (and US Congress) acting to protect businesses that had long been contractors for NASA. For example, consider the oligopoly of space launch providers, including the Shuttle, that had existed after Challenger through to the DoD's EELV (Evolutionary Expendable Launch Vehicle) program which encouraged competition between Boeing and Lockheed Martin's launch vehicles and creation of new launch vehicles just below the Shuttle's range.
You have that right. This goes back to fight between Howard Hughes and LBJ during the space race. While it doesn't get much mention anymore. Before Apollo, there was the Surveyor missions from 1966 to 1968. Hughes put soft landing probes on moon at a tenth of the cost of Apollo. He had designs for putting a pressurized capsule in the same launch mechanism and even a plan for commerical sponsorship. LBJ and his cronies stopped it turning Apollow and the Space Shuttle into a jobs project. Hughes was a very bright cookie and immedate saw the pork and overdesign in the Apollo and Space Shuttle making it not commercially viable. Why is this happening now? You can blame Bush. ;)
If it had been left to the private sector, we'd wouldn't have got to the moon, mars, the heliosheath. And despite the fact that earth orbit is profitable, probably no private sector project would have made the investment or taken the risk to go to space at all.
Perhaps not though such things weren't left to the private sector so we won't know for a while. But what we can say is that public sector projects make up in inefficient, graft, and sheer incompetence, what they gain in resources. Hence, we've been to the Moon, but haven't returned in almost four decades. And we've never been to anywhere else outside of Earth orbit (when are you sending people?).
Meanwhile private projects while generally far smaller than public projects are greatly more effective with the money they spend. Perhaps it wouldn't be the case that in the absence of public investment that we'd have a space presence as advanced as present. But it's worth noting that even despite the presence of NASA and other large government space programs that there has been a healthy amateur rocketry groups and such. My view is that development of the technology necessary for space development would occur anyway.
A possible rebuttal here is that NASA and such inspire these amateur groups. But it's worth noting in reply that the amateur groups precede NASA's creation by about a couple of decades. The same culture that hacks cars, planes, boats, and so on also hacks rockets.
Moving on, there has been a remarkable lack of utility from the vast amount of money that has been spent on space activities by the civilian parts of the governments of the world. The stuff we associate with human society such as people and economies, just aren't present in quantity in space despite more than half a century of government activity.
It's just not that big a hurdle for a purely private effort to overcome.
Space X can only do what it's doing now because it's standing on the shoulders of previous public sector projects. And heck this very project is being paid for by the public sector.
And the question here is how high are those shoulders? And what have those shoulders done for us lately? Currently, it appears that the only thing the government is good for in developing space, is the role of check writer. That's not much of a role.
Of course, they did. That's typical rent-seeker behavior whether public or private. It serves both to protect their captive revenue stream and avoid actual work which costs money.
But you can't rent seek (at least for half a century or more) without a government or other really stable and powerful entity to provide the noncompetitive revenue stream.
(You'd better get the reference :)
Dragon isn't scheduled to dock at the ISS until Friday.
The Dragon isn't capable of docking, it has to be grappled by the station's robotic arm and berthed to a common berthing port. It is scheduled to receive an upgrade that enables it to use docking ports in the future, but on this flight, it's berthing, not docking.
Actually even successful private companies can become inefficient and incompetent, usually when they start operating almost in monopoly. Then other leaner and more focused companies appear and start killing them. I believe it's not public vs private, it's about competition and also the inefficiencies due to the size of the company. Public often is big and has no competition by default, so the problem is aggravated.
It's wrong to think so much of the public vs. private thing. Ultimately corporations and individuals act at the request of the government and have a role in influencing it. And large corporations like Boeing or Lockheed Martin act as administrative units in themselves, establishing rules and regulations for their workforce, holding elections among their shareholders, sending lobbiests to congress and so fourth.
The main difference here is the way NASA and SpaceX are working together. Rather than issuing a cost plus contract and heavily overseeing and micro-managing the development of this rocket, they've issued a fixed price contract and left most of the details up to SpaceX. The reason it works is SpaceX is ultimately responsible for the financial results of the endeavor. If they come in under the bid amount (which is their intention) they make money. The more they save, the more they make. If they come in over budget they either lose money or they have to go back to NASA and ask for more (at which time the whole project would be in question). But you can only do this with well developed technologies, so that you know the costs well enough to bid a reasonable amount. If you try it with cutting edge technology, it would almost certainly fail.
Hopefully someday NASA will be able to simply buy newly developed rockets "off the shelf" where companies and individuals bear the risks of development on their own, but that'll only happen if SpaceX is secessfull in bringing the costs down by another order of magnitude or so (which is their intention).
Which is why NASA sank $300m into SpaceX am-I-right?
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The launch went off without a hitch.
Not so: There have been several launch date delays since the mission was announced, most recently on 19 May 2012, due to a launch abort during the last second before liftoff.
Maybe *this* launch went fine but that doesn't mean the mission launched on time and without a hitch.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Ah, there you go, thinking that Private industry isn't innovative enough to learn how to do that without the government.
Trust me, they're quite capable. Just look around at all the little ads you see from various people looking for work.
More of them are cheats than you will believe. They have a diffuse base which they con, it's not a singular entity at all.
People are the problem, for whatever reason.
Ah, there you go, thinking that Private industry isn't innovative enough to learn how to do that without the government.
No, not "innovative", private industry isn't powerful enough to do that. As to the comments about people, the reward system has to change. If businesses are rewarded for being scoundrel rather than useful members of society, then scoundrels will be what comes.
Public often is big and has no competition by default, so the problem is aggravated.
I spoke of symptoms, you speak here of causes. It is the same thing.
If it had been left to the private sector, we'd wouldn't have got to the moon, mars, the heliosheath.
How come? Because private individuals aren't explorers?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
What keeps companies lean and competent is the ability for new companies to come into the industry. If you and a bunch of your buddies can start up a new rocket company (assuming you have the skills necessary to make them), you should be able to start bending metal and put them into the air.
When new companies can form, it also allows for those bloated and inefficient companies to go bankrupt because they can't compete against these new start-up companies. For something like spaceflight, there are benefits for a well established company to continue doing what it has been doing for years as they have a safety record and can show the quality of what they've done in the past so it is an uphill climb to be recognized as a new start-up company even if you are good. Still, having new companies forming allows not only for growth of the industry, but also makes it so no single company is "too big to fail". THAT is where you get companies which should be shut down and get bloated.
As is happening now within the traditional launcher companies, they are really working hard on trying to stay relevant in terms of competing against the new start-up companies. For years they were inefficient and in fact the cost of spaceflight over the past couple of decades has been steadily going up. American companies have all but stopped performing private commercial launches (for things like communications satellites, photo survey sats, and other vehicles doing commercial activity in space right now). They've been living off of the gravy train coming from the federal government presuming that source of revenue would remain eternally theirs. Instead they are discovering they left an opening for new companies to form like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Armadillo Aerospace, and Scaled Composites to take away at least part of the business that formerly went to these traditional aerospace companies.
Scaled Composites is interesting as it was very successful at what it did, built "SpaceShip One" in terms of a suborbital vehicle, and then was purchased by Northrup-Grumman because they were doing things that Northrup-Grumman couldn't do at the time. More than a few offers have been made to Elon Musk to purchase SpaceX (he said so in a recent interview). If these companies are inefficient, they will lose market share and potentially be forced to leave the industry altogether.
BTW, the same thing unfortunately applies to government agencies, but the problem with a government agency is that they generally don't go bankrupt and almost never are shut down. Some agencies like NASA started out as really efficient little organizations with dedicated employees and a thirst to get something amazing done. They became over time bloated and inefficient, but unfortunately there is no way to kill an agency like that. It becomes a political football to even try to clean up any sort of waste, and most political attempts to clean up the corruption tend to inflate costs even more simply because it adds further regulations and layers of oversight. The only way to really reduce costs in a government bureaucracy is to shut it down completely. Because that offends some political constituency who do give campaign contributions to elected officials, that agency simply won't be shut down.
Private companies routinely do get shut down though. That is called bankruptcy. For myself, I think bankruptcy is a good thing because it forces resources allocated to failing companies to be put to better uses elsewhere. In an ideal world, it would be just the folks at the top who get into trouble for mismanaging the company. I can name some examples where this did happen, but often enough it doesn't happen... usually due to some sort of political cover those at the top of company leadership have received from elected officials and business laws that don't hold those running such lousy companies from personal responsibility for their actions.
Currently, it appears that the only thing the government is good for in developing space, is the role of check writer. That's not much of a role.
You're forgetting that this is capitalism we're talking about. The role of checkwriter is the most important role of all.
It is made +5 interesting because it is true.
While there has been some private commercial space projects, most of those (especially Intelsat) had essentially a government granted monopoly on certain aspects of space development. It really had much more in common with... well 1930's Germany than a true form of capitalism and a free market. While technically "commercial" and "private companies", the distinction between what these companies were doing in space and a government agency is mostly semantics. For most of what Boeing has been doing in space is as a government contractor using "cost-plus" contracts where they aren't even risking their own money to make the vehicles they are building. The "cost" part of such contracts is that no matter how much it costs them to make whatever it is that they are making, that the government guarantees it will be paid, and the "plus" is the profit they will earn for doing the job. They are guaranteed a certain amount of money that they will earn regardless of the cost it takes to get the job done.
NASA has gone out of their way to make sure that only companies like Boeing could get into space, where until the past decade or so there wasn't even a government agency which could even authorize somebody to put their own rocket into space. We now have the FAA Office of Commercial Spaceflight (called FAA-AST due to being the "Administrator for Space Transportation") which has the authority to grant that permission and NASA was even explicitly cut out of the loop for deciding if those spacecraft are safe... unless they are being used by NASA personnel or for a NASA contract.
On top of that, at least for the 1970's and 1980's NASA published prices for commercial payloads on the Space Shuttle that were so heavily subsidized that it killed all efforts at commercial spaceflight. If you want specifics, look up the name Jim Benson and look at the companies he started where NASA personnel did repeated political moves to kill his companies and prevent him from getting a rocket into space. At least Jim Benson lived long enough to see SpaceShip One fly and validate his ideas for spaceflight. His company lives on as a subsidiary of the Sierra Nevada corporation.
I could name other examples (look up what Deke Slayton did after he left the NASA astronaut corps), but there certainly are many examples of how many very skilled and intelligent people tried in vain to get private commercial spaceflight to happen. The only reason private companies are more successful today is that the traditional launch builders got complacent thinking their system for building rockets would never be challenged.