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Dragon Capsule Heads Home From ISS
An Anonymous Coward sent word that the SpaceX Dragon capsule is heading home from the International Space Station. From the article: "The unmanned Dragon space capsule set off from the International Space Station Sunday for the cargo-laden return trip to Earth after successfully delivering its first commercial payload, NASA said.
Using a robotic arm, an astronaut aboard the floating laboratory detached and released the capsule at 1329 GMT after an 18-day mission to resupply the space station, the first ever by a privately-owned company, SpaceX.
The next step will be to bring the capsule out of orbit by intermittently firing its onboard engines to slow its speed.
It is then supposed to parachute into the Pacific Ocean off the California coast at 1920 GMT."
Space X is posting updates here: http://www.spacex.com/webcast/ , unfortunately there is no live video feed, only status updates.
Of course I like the fact that space travel is becoming a commercial matter, with more opportunities for us civvies, but here we also see the decline of NASA. They used to build one cool thing after another and launch greater and greater mission (Gemini, Apollo, Pioneer, Mariner, etc), but now the NASA is losing it's momentum and budget.
One cause of this is because it doesn't set any real goals any more. In the good ol' days NASA had goals; put a man on the moon, put a robot on Mars, send a satellite to the edge of the solar system, etc, but now it's primary occupation is the ISS, where they do research which might one day be useful. (in the far future)
Yes, curiosity was cool, but it wasn't new. It wasn't groundbreaking research and technology. According to Robert Zubrin who explains this far better than I can, we could have people on Mars by now.
The reason we don't is because the NASA has become unfocused.
Dragon, to me, symbolizes this.
AccountKiller
What blows my mind is that people think landing a science tank on mars demonstrates a mundane lack of goals.
The benefits of the of the Space Station are not only research into the things we might need to know for human space travel.
Much more valuable in the short term are advances in material sciences in zero and near zero gravity.
Also, although there would be some "ethical" issues, we need to understand the possibilities of human reproduction in space - it's going to happen, especially if they do something stupid like a multi-year mission to Mars, there will be sex.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Splash down already occurred.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
No, the value of the ISS is much, much more mundane. How to keep a gigantic pile of junk working in space. Short term flips around the moon or earth orbit are one thing, but you really have to be able to do stuff like fix something when it breaks.
The human reproduction thing will probably have to wait a while, but we can practice in the mean while.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Actually, blood, urine and feces down. And these are IMPORTANT. VERY IMPORTANT. They will help with the 1yr mission that is coming up.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
An Anonymous Coward send word
I are very happy to hear it.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
At this point, it would be completely irresponsible to put fertile men and women on a long-term trip. Chances are the woman and her baby would die.
If we don't have gravity (or centrifugal imitations of gravity) other bad things could happen.
Even if the baby survives, imagine the shock of encountering gravity after more than a year in space. It will not be familiar with gravity, which might lead to it jumping of an object, expecting to fly, but falling instead.
The child's muscles might also be very underdeveloped and it's bones would be way too high on collagen and not strong enough for a gravitational environment.
AccountKiller
Right now the launches are still few and far between, and there's no hurry, so I say why not leave it docked with the ISS for a couple months? It can serve as a backup lifeboat in the event of a disaster on the ISS. I know it's not man-rated yet but if the choice is between breathing vacuum and using the Dragon, I'd jump into the Dragon in a heartbeat.
The lack of seats or restraints would affect the surviveablity of splashdown.
I do not think he is talking about the absence of doctors being a problem, but rather two issues inherent in the space environment namely increased amounts of radiation interfering with proper development of the child and the absence of gravity which might or might not be needed for various biological processes.
Yes, curiosity was cool, but it wasn't new. It wasn't groundbreaking research and technology.
Unlike Beagle 2? (I'm British so maybe I'm allowed to joke about this!)
If you are not inspired by spacecraft currently exploring Mercury, Mars, and Saturn, and spacecraft on the way to Pluto, Ceres and Jupiter, then you may be an expensive person to please.
Wind back the clock about two decades. Congress killed the highly successful NERVA engine in the early/mid 70's because it was way too successful and had they let the project finish we would have been going to mars in another ten years, which was way too expensive at the time after the Apollo program.
moox. for a new generation.
Astronauts regularly claim unused cargo containers as private bedrooms. Apparently they're the quietest parts of the station by a wide margin (cooling the ISS is a noisy job, apparently) and thus make sleeping a lot easier.
The Soyuz is a better option as a lifeboat (That's what it's designed to do) but you'll note today the undocking was completely automated. Eventually these will carry humans and possibly will carry the last humans off the space station when they deorbit the ISS in 10-20 years.
Finally, there's a Soyuz craft that will be docking there at the end of the month, so they need to clear the spot in time to avoid a delay in Russia's launch schedule.
moox. for a new generation.
It's pure cost benefit analysis. Sending people out to do planetary science costs a lot more than sending robots out to do science. If science is the goal, then for every manned science mission to a single destination, they could send ten robotic missions to multiple destinations. A manned mission has to carry all the stuff to keep people alive as well as carrying all the science stuff, and the more you carry, the more it costs.
It is unfair to compare NASA of the '60s to the agency since then. NASA in the '60s had practically a blank check for a few years. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo were part of the Cold War and got military style commitments from the populace and the government. Even with that, Apollo was a flukey and unlikely thing -- before he died Kennedy had gotten cold feet about the dollar cost of his moon goal and was considering asking the Russians to "join together" in going to the moon. Kennedy's assassination made Apollo politically untouchable for just long enough to finish the project. Notice that NASA did not set the moon goal -- it was set by Kennedy and that was only because he needed a goal ambitious enough that the US had a good chance to overtake the Russians' space lead and beat them to it. And most Americans at the time were more concerned with "beating the Russians" than the "noble goals" of space exploration. Give NASA a '60's style goal, budget, and national priority and we will be on Mars in 10-15 years, but I don't see the confluence of events which created Apollo in the '60s ever happening again.
Every time I see a statement like this, I ask: Where is the science to back up any statement of any kind about any mammalian reproduction?
Hint: There isn't any at all... at least any sort that would tell you about what will happen to somebody conceiving a child in space and carrying that baby full term to birth. I'm not talking just humans here but any kind of mammal, including rats, mice, or even monkeys.
This is also an experiment that to me is long overdue to be conducted on the ISS or some other space platform. To me it is a travesty that it was never done earlier. The main reason why such studies haven't been done is because NASA is too prudish about sex and has either rejected or dismissed such proposals in the past... even when there have been mixed genders of small mammals that have gone into space before.
There have been some experiments done with mammal ovum and sperm done in a "simulated microgravity" environment... but they really aren't really anything more than a little past the basic embryo stage when that was done and powerful magnetic environments are a lousy simulation of microgravity. There was a pregnant rat which gave birth on the Space Shuttle...where the mom and the babies seemed to have done just fine, although that was limited to just a couple of weeks due to the limitations of the Space Shuttle itself for long-term missions. Some mice and rats have gone up to the ISS, but they have been explicitly separated by protocol from attempting reproduction during those experiments.
Chances are likely that the first "experiments" will be done with humans before it is done with any other mammal... something I consider a travesty simply because such clueless statements like this one are repeatedly made and sentiments about sterilization of spaceflight participants is made through assumptions rather than any sound understanding of what is actually happening based upon real science. Assumptions can be made, but that is all they are.
Some sort of artificial gravity (aka a spinning torus) may be necessary... and certainly there have been almost no long terms studies about what happens in a partial gravity environment to almost any living thing. There was going to be a centrifuge added to the ISS, but that module is one of the items cut from the design when budget considerations started to be applied. About the only significant partial gravity environment studied was the experience the dozen Apollo astronauts experienced while on the Moon... and the most any of those astronauts spent on the Moon was just three days. That coupled with the fact they were in a microgravity environment going to and from the Moon sort of negates the experience as well from serious consideration of determining any long-term health complications from living in a partial (say Mars-like) environment.
It is best to simply say "we don't know" and end it at that.
W. Bush funded Constellation, although that funding was supposed to continue on past the end of his term. It didn't. I'm not saying that I think Michael Griffin's NASA was really into going to some place beyond low-Earth orbit either, but at least a serious effort was made toward that end and something more than I can say of the Obama administration. The last president to offer any sort of substantive support for NASA was the Johnson administration, which is sort of why the center in Houston, Texas bears his name.
Constellation was a disaster in part because it was only half-way into what was needed to pull the thing off. It really did need a larger budget and much more commitment to getting done, not to mention that there were other problems that the program really didn't address including the fact that up to that point in time launch costs were going up faster than inflation... indeed still are if you consider traditional launchers.
SpaceX offers a glimpse that perhaps the cost of spaceflight can be a fair bit cheaper, but I'm not convinced that SpaceX will be successful at making a meaningful drop in price in the long term. At least if SpaceX becomes a "traditional launch company" and gets in on the gravy train of government launch contracts, I expect that their prices will eventually get up to what the other "big boys" are currently charging for launches.
The lack of seats or restraints would affect the surviveablity of splashdown.
Why would a simple hammock not work to help increase survivability? I don't think it would necessarily be that hard, as a scuba tank + hammock may be all you would really need. The capsule already needed to be "man-rated" simply to dock to the ISS in the first place and certainly would contain air pressure.
I'd certainly want to try and find as many "soft" items to survive re-entry in even the current Dragon capsule as opposed to trying to re-enter the way that the Columbia astronauts attempted re-entry.
What happened to the satellite it was supposed to bring into orbit, but couldn't because one of the engines failed during lift off? Did they manage to get that in its proper orbit?
Small children jump off things even when they were born on Earth.
Considering I have several children.... you had better believe that I have been in the delivery room for the birth of every single one of my children. One of them even spent some time in the neo-natal unit of the hospital with some complications due to the birth. I had one of my children saved from nearly certain death because of a very skilled obstetrician... although a very skilled and mature mid-wife likely could have done the same thing in the same situation. While I did talk with my wife about home deliveries, it was the "just in case" situations that we didn't know that caused us to go to a hospital.
I also witnessed an obstetrician do some things on my 3rd child that likely could have resulted in a malpractice lawsuit if I had cared to bother with the issues. He still has some long term health consequences from that incident that my wife and I are dealing with, so you had also better believe I've seen the whole range both good and bad what the medical profession can dish out in this situation.
Don't go presuming something you know nothing about, particularly about another person. My attitude is that something should be done with watching what mice will do first in space, since we have that ability and capability. My concern is that the first experiments will be done on humans because of callousness and a total disregard for human life. I find that a horrible thing to see particularly because there are other options available.
Considering the other kinds of experiments that are done with mice here on the Earth, seeing what happens to a bunch of mice over the course of several generations in the ISS wouldn't be all that bad and in fact might give some amazing insights into the life cycles of what we might expect when that happens to people. Is there a problem with bone development in the womb? Can there even be multiple generations of any mammal be born in space? Does living in a partial gravity environment mitigate any of the problems that arise from a microgravity situation?
My point is that you can't answer a bloody single one of those questions because the science hasn't been done. Do not confuse this thinking that it is impossible to do the science (unlike studying rock formations on Mars that only now Curiosity is just barely able to get started on) but rather because the powers that be who decide what is going to be studied simply refuse to do this kind of research. I would also dare say that knowing the long-term health consequences of gestational development as well as even adolescent growth and development in space are things that we need to know about now, as there will soon be kids going into space sooner or later where intelligent decisions about how they are to be treated and what problems they may encounter are very legitimate concerns to mission planners.
I do agree this isn't much to do with sex, but the gestational development of children in the womb is something that really does need to be investigated. I also think it is irresponsible to be making blanket statements saying that people need to be sterile or at an age where conception is not really an option if they are going to be traveling into space. Find out first what is the problem and then go from that point forward.
My point about doing human experimentation first is that I'm suggesting that the callous and prudish behavior on the part of the decision makers is going to make human experimentation on the subject what will end up happening... by default. If no other legitimate scientific studies are done to really examine the issues involved, the first time it will become an issue to worry about will be due to the fact it will be a human child or embryo that will need to be a part of the statistical universe. If you think that is unethical, I would have to agree... other than the fact that ample opportunity to perform this kind of study has been made available in the past on non-human subjects first but that the policy makers who could make a difference in this situations have deliberately chosen to wait until it is a human trial first so they can decide if it is safe to bring up rabbits and mice later on. That is ass backward and something that needs to be pointed out to those engaged in mission planning.