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ISS Captures SpaceX Dragon Capsule
Today at 9:56AM EDT (13:56 GMT) the robotic arm on the International Space Station successfully captured SpaceX's Dragon capsule. It's the first time a commercial craft has connected with the ISS, and the first time a spacecraft made in the U.S. has gone to the station since the retirement of the shuttle. The approach was delayed temporarily as engineers worked out bad sensor readings due to light reflected off the ISS's Kibo laboratory. "To work around the problem, SpaceX narrowed the field of view for the laser sensor so that it wouldn't pick up light from the offending reflector. Dragon then returned to the 30-meter checkpoint and moved in for the final approach." If all goes well today, the capsule will most likely be opened tomorrow. Video of the operation is being broadcast live on NASA TV.
That's it. Just hooray.
Can someone please post a recording of the approach and capture?
It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him. Dragons may not have much real use for all their wealth, but they know it to an ounce as a rule, especially after long possession...
Enterprise Intro (Rod Stewart Version) on the occasion...
Today the ISS, tomorrow LV-426! ;) Gratz to SpaceX and the ISS crew.
Fucking awesome.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Now that Usenet is fading into history, is He monitoring the Slashdot feed? We'll see.
Everyone should be proud that their dream has come true.
Thank you for your hard work in providing a new capability for space flight.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
After half a century of unsustainable government space endeavors, we may finally see some progress toward receiving actual benefits from space flight, now that the profit motive of the private sector has been (at least partially) restored. The strive for profit will necessarily lead to advancements in space tech, as they have in all other industries where long-term profitability is the primary incentive (Silicon Valley being the prime modern example).
If you point your FTA dish at the ISS and can track it you can watch the real feed. If your FTA receiver can do all the different broadcast file types.
I am controlling the FTA dish with my Ham radio tracker (Alt-Az FTW bitches) and use it to view.
Problem is I only can watch when they pass in a visible window :-( Dang you line of sight and physics!
Otherwise point your FTA setup at AMC18 at 105.0deg W. Transponders 39 to 41.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Can't, Obi-Wan dicked with it.
Profit has always been a motive. Unfortunately, the big aerospace contractors made a profit whether or not they actually did what they were contracted to do. Now companies like SpaceX will profit for actually getting things done, which, as you say, should move things along in the right direction.
If the money that's paying for it is coming from taxes, its not commercial.
NASA hardware has always been built primarily by private companies like Lockheed Martin.
In Washington jargon, when you give money to contractors instead of federal employees, its "commercial" or "free enterprise", so they can pretend to be in favor of freedom and against government. But one of the main reasons for it is its a way of evading controls on executive salaries. There's a revolving door where government program managers funnel lucrative contracts to private companies with ridiculously high overhead rates, then afterwards go to work at those companies. Its common to already have a hiring agreement with the company before awarding the contract.
I'm not suggesting what the situation is with SpaceX, I'm just commenting on "commercial" space development in general. Its commercial if its commercial activity, such as space tourism or putting up satellites that private companies pay for. Otherwise its double-speak.
In any case, congrats on the engineering achievement, I don't mean to detract from that.
If it were me, I would just use the tractor beam and pull it into the hangar.
We haven't invented tractor beams yet and they don't have a hangar. Any other bright ideas, captain? No, we can't even go to warp to get any, and the Vulcans are not watching.
As for SpaceX & Dragon && ISS, seriously cool. Keep it up. :-) I for one am cheering for you.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Is using the robotic arm the only way the Dragon spacecraft will be allowed to dock with the ISS? It seems to be cumbersome and to take a long time.
Or is this only being done now for safety reasons and, with more experience, a direct approach and docking will be allowed?
No it wasn't run by NASA... NASA was the customer and gave a list of conditions to be met... However it was ran by Space X and not NASA
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The strive for profit will necessarily lead to advancements in space tech, as they have in all other industries where long-term profitability is the primary incentive (Silicon Valley being the prime modern example).
SpaceX, Virgin Galactic et. al. aren't going into space because they are private sector.
SpaceX, Virgin Galactic et. al. are going into space because they are run by individuals who have made shedloads of money in other ventures and, instead of being good capitalists and starting work on their next shedload, have decided instead to try and realise their childhood ambition of being an astronaut, if only vicariously (has Elon Musk been sighted since the launch? :-) )
Kudos to them of course - and they may even end up making money - but without that sort of motivation the private sector would, at most, look at ways of making a risk-free buck by launching comms satellites rather than trying to put people into space.
As others have pointed out, the real test will - unfortunately - come the first time someone gets killed. I'm not sure the private sector could afford a Challenger inquiry.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
(Disclaimer: I work in aerospace)
Private sector space exploration is a mixed blessing without regulatory oversight.
The FAA does wonders for ensuring consistent manufacturing and engineering policies, as do the various ISO industrial process certification programs for industrial centers.
Government sponsored engineering tends to be a total money and resource sink, and what comes out tends to look like the engineers went out of their way to make things needlessly cryptic and arcane to justify their bills.
Essentially, the equivalent of a 500 line "hello world!", which ignores normal OS window classes, allocates and frees its own memory, and has an integrated kernel runtime to make sure nobody is snooping on the secret sauce from outside of userspace.
Private designs tend to shy away from uniqueness, and toward stringent use of the KISS principle, but may excessively use protected engineering documentation and practices. (Imagine somebody writing their own application API on top of the perfectly functional standard one for their target, and locking that bitch down so tight that its like watching a snuff film, then using it religiously to keep people from "copying" their ideas. Nevermind that all their competitors are also working from the KISS handbook on the actual engineering, and that the differences are all almost entirely process related. Fit form and function is conserved.)
Oversight helps to keep these proprietary engineering toolbases under control, and helps ensure interoperability of critical systems, like runway boarding ramps on the aircraft's skin, type of fuel used, and standard cabin pressures.
Without the unifying influence of such oversight, no airplane in the sky would follow any standards except internal OEM ones. An airbus and a boeing offering would not use the same cabin pressure (just to throw something out there), because one of them would get the brightt idea to lower it 5psi so they could fly a little higher and reduce skin stresses as a competative edge.
Space vehicles, being radically new to private industry, would be especially vulnerable to marketing and PR drones dictating on the engineering so that the vehicle stands out from the crowd, even though that is a terrible thing for interoperability.
So, while I like the leaner design implementations that come out of private companies, I strongly advocate oversight and regulatory compliance for safety and interoperability reasons.
Otherwise the specs on a private spaceship will be a countless mess of cross-referencing NDA laden proprietary internal standards docs, and as an engineer for a company that does outsourced work from the big boys, I only have so much goddam space on my desk for binders full of proprietary specifications so I can read somebody's engineering properly. "Torque bolts to LES####" is fine and dandy if you work for learjet. For the rest of us, I'm happy to get an AME or NAS number that I can look up instead of calling your support line, talking with a string of bobbleheads behind desks who are more concerned over weather or not I might discuss what's in a spec for tightening bolts with "unauthorized" people, and if I am indeed authorized to know the secret of the bolt tightening in the first place. I'm an engineer. Just give me the damn spec, your corporate crap smells up my day.
Regulatory oversight makes things magically simpler, because it forces LES#### to be compliant with a standard AMS#### or similar regulatory body that I don't have to suck a dick to get my hands on.
I'm thrilled that the dragon heavy lifter works. It opens all sorts of doors for much cheaper orbital deployments, and the soyouz capsules were starting to have unreliable failure rates from excessive use and improper maintenance downtimes. This will work wonders.
But for FSM's sake, institute some damned industry regulations!
The problem is Sci-Fi in some regards had made the impossible/impractical come seem like the norm... This is why we put way too much time and money into the shuttle program, We wanted a "reusable" spacecraft like we see in Sci-Fi. Even though it is cheaper per flight to make disposable space craft. But we spent decades on the idea of the Reusable Space craft. I wonder how much further ahead we would be if we focused on the disposable craft.
For one every launch there will be improvements to the craft, because they can. Second you would get a new fresh group of people making crafts all the time so the knowledge and experience is passed to each generation. Third we would have crafts specialized for each mission, the shuttle is a general purpose device... Thus not really fit for any mission.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If the money that's paying for it is coming from taxes, its not commercial.
You are correct in a sense. The current primary customer (NASA) happens to be a government agency and that agency does pay with tax dollars. Saying it is commercial is very much a short hand for a more complicated story. SpaceX also already has contracts with private sector companies as well. Furthermore its operations and R&D were funded privately initially to the tune of something like $400 million. Funding from NASA has come from progress payments on launch contracts. The fact that NASA is a government agency is somewhat incidental to the operations of SpaceX. Our company has had the government as a customer (we've sent products into space) in the past but that doesn't mean we aren't a private company or that what we do isn't commercial.
. . . who hopes that there's an inflatable, spring-loaded Xenomorph puppet poised behind the capsule's hatch?
"Heh - heh. You'll find a complimentary set of new underwear for the crew in Bin 13."
I don't think it is fair to classify them based on who is paying for the ride.
Lockheed Martin never had a goal of standing on their own, they always relied on the government to pick up the tab.Space X seems to be going from the direction of "We take the risk" more so than true defense contractors.
Space X also can provide services to other commercial and national interests. They certainly do not have the cost structure the truly government funded launches used.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
You may want to check out Orbital Sciences Corporation (OSC).
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
There is a reason every time something cool is done it's done in America first
First train? English.
First commercial train service? Manchester to Liverpool.
First car? German.
First TV? Invented by a Scotsman.
First TV broadcast service? English.
First freeway/motorway/autobahn? German.
First satellite? Russian.
First man in space? Russian.
First man to orbit the Earth? Russian.
First woman in space? Russian.
First moon rover? Russian.
First space walk? Russian.
First space station? Russian. (The ISS has a Salyut-derived core)
First probe to land on another planet? Russian.
Countless records broken for long duration stays in orbit? Russian.
Inventor of the jet engine? English.
Home of first electronic computer? Manchester, England.
First supersonic airliner? Anglo-French.
Inventor of the World Wide Web? An Englishman working in Switzerland.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Maybe we need to change this? It's a rather sad statement that profit trumps all and is the only valid motivation for expanding our horizons.
Please remember that the profit motive includes charitable donations, such as the X prize and the Bigelow prize.
Between space tourism, commercial satellites, research performed by private universities and private companies, charitable donations, (in the future) space mining and (farther in the future) space colonisation, we have plenty of profit motive to fund space exploration.
Running a voluntary economy simply means that we respect people's property rights, instead of taking tax money from them by force and spending on projects that often turn out to be inefficient, or corrupt, or boondogles, or simply not worth the cost.
Many projects that today are performed by the government would, in a freer society, be performed by private organisations, if the government wasn't undercutting them through the use of tax money taken by force. Others wouldn't be performed, because they simply wouldn't be worth the cost.
I am not a libertarian anarcho-capitalist, and, in particular, I don't think right now that the government should completely step out of space exploration. But I do think that the government needs shrinking. And I do think that much of the American space exploration could be done voluntarily (instead of by force) and that, among that portion of space exploration that needs government involvement, some part of it simply is not worth the cost right now (but probably would be in the future).
Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Us_debt#CBO_long-term_scenarios
The primary problem with the shuttle wasn't that it was reusable.
1) The shuttle was built to handle both lots of cargo and humans. That meant that it had to have the reliablity of a man-rated craft with the lifting capacity of a heavy lifter.
2) Not enough funding for a fullly reusable shuttle. Early plans involved a fully reusable shuttle. The shuttle as designed instead was a hybrid which in many respects combined the worst of both reuable and disposable spacecraft.
2) Two much flexibility in orbital parameters was insisted on. This is frequently not appreciated as a serious problem. The US military insisted that the shuttle be able to take off from a variety of other locations including Vandenberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandenberg_AFB_Space_Launch_Complex_6. They wanted it to be able to launch into a near polar orbit, send out a satellite and land all in a single orbit of the Earth. This was so that if things ever got hot with the USSR we could launch additional spy satellites faster than the Soviets could shoot them down, or could launch single use spy satellites for other purposes . This article http://www.space.com/1438-chapter-opens-space-shuttle-born-compromise.html discusses this in detail. There are also other requirements that the military had but it seems that the details remain classified, and it is possible that the public orbital parameters as required by the military were covers for other orbits. But the requirement that the shuttle be able to do absolutely every low Earth orbit that every civilian or military source could possibly want severely constricted the shuttle design in many ways that were never used or infrequently used.
There's another thing to remember though: the shuttle was the world's first reusable craft whereas there have been a lot of single-use craft. The first model of something will often have more problems. We shouldn't take the problems with the shuttle and make a blanket assumption that reusable craft can't be done efficiently.
The funny thing is the Dragon is MORE reusable than the shuttle was. The shuttle's big external tank was not reused.
This is just from a little searching online, but it appear that on the dragon all but the trunk behind the top capsule are reused. The two lower stages and the top capsule are intended to eventually do fancy vertical landings on actual landing pads. No fleet of recovery ships pulling crap out of the ocean needed. That's pretty awesome.
From a comment in latimes:
From the comments, a lot of people have been wondering exactly what "private" means here. With most "non-private" NASA contracts, NASA has direct control over the overall design of the vehicle and uses cost-plus contracts with companies (with massive amounts of red tape) to actually build it; cost-effectiveness is actually undesirable for contractors under those contracts since it means they get less money and there's a strong desire to funnel out work to politically-important congressional districts to maintain political support when cost overruns occur. In this new "private" paradigm NASA pays fixed-cost for the cargo delivered and it's up to the company to determine the best way to meet those goals, and the company is also permitted to commercially sell their services to other customers. It sounds like a small difference to some, but as we've seen it ends up being a one or two orders-of-magnitude more cost-effective for the taxpayer.
You do realize that if it wasn't for a government endeavour, there would be no space station for the dragon capsule to dock with?
Until it starts flying to Bigelow's space stations.
Look, Canada. You make a good robot arm, OK? Nice job, well done. We won't forget it it's your arm, hell, you put your flag all over it. We're impressed, it's a heck of a piece of hardware.
I swear, talking with Canadians about space exploration is like dealing with an insecure kid brother. "Happy mother's day, Mom, we all made you breakfast." "And I made the orange juice, Mom! Isn't it great orange juice? Make sure you try the orange juice, Mom! The orange juice is the most important part of breakfast!"
But none of those things were cool until we did them in the US.