Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
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.
Here you go:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzZvyrrpZ88
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!
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 $400 million. Funding from NASA has come from progress payments on launch contracts. The fact that NASA is a government agency is somewhat incidental to the operations of SpaceX. Our company has had the government as a customer (we've sent products into space) in the past but that doesn't mean we aren't a private company or that what we do isn't commercial.
I'm not suggesting what the situation is with SpaceX
What does your subject line mean then?
If NASA buys toilet paper from a commercial vendor, that doesn't turn the toilet paper manufacturer into a government boondoggle.
SpaceX is commercial in the sense that they offer a product for a price. When you have government contractors who charge "some base amount plus whatever else cost overruns demand the price to increase to" then, yeah, it's a quasi-government entity. SpaceX will eat cost overruns, if they happen, but that's bad for profitability so they try to ensure it doesn't (with good engineering and business acumen). That isn't to say that fleecing government agencies doesn't show good business acumen, but it's also not a private sector endeavour.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
berthing is *harder* than docking. they are doing it this way because it is a cargo transport, and the berthing ports are much larger than the docking ports.
if/when Dragon starts carrying people, it will dock.
. . . 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."
Commercial versus non-commercial is about a company building a standard product which the government utilizes through firm fixed price contracts. SpaceX has a published price for a launch, and that's exactly what they charge. In contrast the traditional NASA approach has been to award cost plus contracts to major contractors and an army of subcontractors and NASA is more of a partner than a customer, building a one-off custom design. In this type of system cost overruns often get billed to the customer (NASA), but with firm fixed price the work is expected to be completed for the agreed upon price and SpaceX has stated that any cost overruns on their NASA programs above the fixed price launch costs will be covered by SpaceX, not NASA.
Contract vehicles notwithstanding, it also appears that even in NASA's opinion SpaceX is simply more efficient at getting things done than the usual NASA & defense contractor method probably due to reduced management and organizational overhead: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/586023main_8-3-11_NAFCOM.pdf
A big part of SpaceX's efficiency is that they are vertically integrated, doing most of the work themselves. With the non-commercial cost-plus model Congress had the ability to split up subcontracts for the shuttle development and manufacturing across the entire nation, with drastic hits to efficiency.
Although it may not seem like a totally commercial enterprise with NASA as the major source of SpaceX's revenue (for now), but there are important changes taking place in how NASA is acquiring launch capacity which seem like they have the capability to reduce costs over the past model
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