ISS Robotic Arm Captures Dragon Capsule

puddingebola writes "From the aricle, 'The SpaceX Dragon capsule has been successfully grabbed by the International Space Station, marking the first time a private American space flight has run a supply mission to the orbiting platform. The crew of the ISS snatched Dragon out of orbit ahead of schedule, using the space station's robotic arm to guide the capsule in after its careful approach.' NASA has also posted video of the docking."

Comments

Video of the capture

[2phar]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wcknJwgzh4

Re:Video of the capture

[Teancum]

There is a reason it looks like 2001: A Space Odyssey.

That movie was based upon reality due to the fact that the director, Stanley Kubrick, wanted to portray something realistic considering that there were real spacecraft going to real places (like the Moon) at the time he was making and released the film. Most other "science fiction" movies gloss over this reality in a horrible way. The only time you get something action packed is when something goes horribly wrong... and perhaps at launch when huge amounts of energy are being released.

Then again do you enjoy watching videos of your father parking his car in the driveway?

Re:Video of the capture

[quacking duck]

The slowest space scene in Apollo 13 was when the command+service module separated from the 3rd stage, then flipped 180 degrees to dock with and extract the lunar module. The whole scene took a minute or so, with tense music accompaniment.

In reality it would've taken much longer; on Apollo 17 it took 15 minutes just to dock, and some more time to check everything before extraction. On Apollo 14 it took six attempts and over two hours, before they finally docked successfully. Apollo 13 is one of my favourite movies, but it's still Hollywood entertainment, with pacing and embellishments to match, and not a documentary or realistic depiction of events.

The video capture of Dragon is far more like 2001, for example the two scenes where space pods are deployed. In both cases you can say the model shots lasted way too long, but that's Teancum's point: it's reality, or pretty close to it in the case of 2001, so naturally they are both "slow".

Re:Second?

[Tx]

I seem to be wrong, according to wikipedia, there was demo flight in May, my memory ain't what it used to be. I guess since that is classed as a test rather than a supply mission, hence the "first" in TFA.

Second docking but first contracted supply mission

[Geoffrey.landis]

Right, in May they demonstrated docking to the Space Station, but it wasn't a supply mission, it was a launch and docking demonstration flight. That first flight did carry some miscellaneous stuff and some student experiments, but it wasn't carrying supplies critical to station operation.

As the summary says, this was the first actual contracted supply mission.

Re:We need space exploration by any method possibl

[Geoffrey.landis]

You do realise the dragon capsule is owned by private company? Nothing to do with government or military

You do realize that the development cost of the Dragon-9 launch vehicle and the cargo transport capsule was paid for by NASA? This is hardly "nothing to do with government."

(The small rocket (Falcon 1) was privately financed.)

Re:We need space exploration by any method possibl

[beltsbear]

A single lightning strike has about 5 billion joules of energy or enough to run an entire household for a month not just one bulb.

Yes but...

[gr8_phk]

IIRC, it's the only rocket that can lose an engine or two and still complete it's primary mission. The last rocket that could do that was the Saturn V.

Great, but they've had 1 engine out in 2 launches. It's fantastic that they have demonstrated that redundancy but at this point in time it's a terrible demonstration of reliability. If we extrapolate a bit (and I'm not a great statistics guy) they should be expecting a dual engine failure about 1/4 of launches and a triple failure probably around 1/10 launches. I doubt they can cope with that.

Let's hope they find a cause (or strong suspect) and correct it, followed by a nice long string of successful launches. ;-)

Re:Second?

[camperdave]

Berthing and Docking are essentially the same thing. The difference is that with docking, the spacecraft is active and the station is passive. The spacecraft lines itself up with the station and connects to it. With berthing, the station is active and the spacecraft is passive. The spacecraft hovers near the station and the station reaches over and grabs it with one of the Canadarms. In both cases, the spacecraft will wind up attached to one of the station's airlocks, so that personnel and cargo can be transferred.