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SpaceX Successfully Delivers Supplies To ISS
Reuters reports on the successful SpaceX-carried resupply mission to the ISS: "A cargo ship owned by Space Exploration Technologies arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, with a delivery of supplies and science experiments for the crew and a pair of legs for the experimental humanoid robot aboard that one day may be used in a spacewalk. Station commander Koichi Wakata used the outpost's 58-foot (18-meter) robotic crane to snare the Dragon capsule from orbit at 7:14 a.m. (1114 GMT), ending its 36-hour journey. ... "The Easter Dragon is knocking at the door," astronaut Randy Bresnik radioed to the crew from Mission Control in Houston. Space Exploration, known as SpaceX, had planned to launch its Dragon cargo ship in March, but was delayed by technical problems, including a two-week hold to replace a damaged U.S. Air Force radar tracking system."
Can't wait until they get Dragonrider working.
Sorry to be raining on your leftard parade, but this is the work of private initiative, not state.
Here it is:
I think you Americans first and foremost need to fix the madhouse of NY finance. These folks will happily destroy completely healthy industries and they have spread their cyncial view of how people should cheat each other in order to get weatlhy.
In other words, you need a guy like Vlad Putin to run the show in Washington. And I mean this totally serious - Putin cleaned out the Augias Stable that had developed under Jelzin. Russians almost starved while some insanely rich bastards (as in Bill-Gates class rich) stole the natural riches of the largest country on the globe.
I am not from the FSB, neither do I have business relationships with Russia. I am just fucked over by NY like most other people in Pax Americana countries. And I can see through the mainstream lies.
Free enterprise can work nicely, if the state clamps down on irresponsible and cyncial finance actors.
AT Slashdot Censor: come on, let me post this message.
This message was in response to
Begs for Change (+1)
Jim Sadler 7 hours ago
As we already have too many folks begging for change how about we get smart and really beg for change. That is to say let's get real and admit that we nee to do a basic change in the way the economy works. The old ideas and methods do not fit into modern realities at all. A redistribution of wealth is in order as well as the simple fact that we will have less and less jobs available every year. That spells disaster as we clearly will have more and more people available every year. Here is a demonstration of why the economic model does not work now. Picture seven hundred coal miners per shift going down into the mine and producing coal. Now picture modern mining equipment being delivered and instead of seven hundred workers only twelve are now on each shift to produce even more coal than the seven hundred men used to do. But here is the snag. The price of coal keeps going up and up. Coal is less affordable despite getting rid of almost all of the workers. Then we start to understand just how severe the effects of burning coal really are and we start to restrict the use of coal sharply. Meanwhile we flood the labor markets with ever more immigrants seeking work. But other effects kick in. In the bad old days a man could go catch a fish if he was short on food. But almost no fish in W. Virginia or Kentucky are at all safe to eat because coal has left heavy metals in almost 100% of the rivers, streams and ponds in those states. Meanwhile we really don't want the public to be aware that crops also pick up those nasty pollutants and if the water is not fit to drink chances are the tomato or corn or spinach grown on that land is also unfit for food. Then we turn around and feed that stuff to beef, to chickens or make pellets to feed fish on fish farms. After all who will really blow the whistle on pollutants in the food supply?
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This. At least when Boeing was suckling from government teat using government engineers, launching from government land and employing publicly-educated engineers, it didn't have the gall to advertise that "Boeing successfully delivers...", just collect the money.
What a shame. Once there was hope that humanity could escape the idiocy of the religion of the Invisible Hand. It seems even that dream is further away now. Well, unless China overtakes the US, anyway :D.
pair of legs for the experimental humanoid robot aboard that one day may be used in a spacewalk
Because everyone knows that any robot needs prosthetic legs in order to "walk" in space...
Now that it has legs...
NASA's LADEE ends it's mission to explore the Moon's atmosphere, and Space-X docks at the ISS.
Where are all those who keep saying the US has lost it's interest in Space?
Somebody tell the Georgists that there's lots of land on Mars to not own and let's see them beat Musk to the stars. The more the merrier!
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
>SpaceX is one of two companies hired by NASA to fly cargo to the space station
So instead of just doing it themselves they write a check to Elon Musk to do it who then pockets a sizable chunk of your tax dollars as profit.
Corporations and government combined is the definition of fascism according to Mussolini.
Not only can they deliver supplies to the ISS without the need to pay the Russians to do it but they can probably do it cheaper than the Russians too.
Corporations and government combined is the definition of fascism according to Mussolini.
Since when did Mussolini have a valid opinion on anything? He was spouting propaganda, not delivering a scientific argument. As for writing a check to Elon Musk: are you implying that any government buying a service from a private company is a fascist state? Because I don't think you and I have the same definition of fascism in that case.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Same stupid off topic troll in every thread. What a moron.
The first space station went up in 1971. Forty-three years later, private industry figures out how to send a rocket up there. With taxpayers footing the bill.
John Galt is half a retard.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Lost in the moronic editing by the eggs-and-dye-mostly department:
After the Falcon 9's first-stage section separated from the upper-stage motor and Dragon capsule, the discarded rocket relit some of its engines to slow its fall back through the atmosphere and position itself to touch down vertically on the ocean before gravity turned it horizontal. The booster also was equipped with four 25-foot-long landings for stabilization.
Data transmitted from an airplane tracking the booster's descent indicated it splashed down intact in the Atlantic Ocean - a first for the company.
"Data upload from tracking plane shows landing in Atlantic was good! Several boats enroute through heavy seas," SpaceX's chief executive, Elon Musk, posted on Twitter late Friday.
This is a Big Fucking Deal. SpaceX publicly gave odds for this working at about 1 in 3. This is an important incremental step in (literally) landing their lower stages, rather than trashing them (like every other launch system) or attempting to recover them after splashdown (like shuttle boosters).
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
The US civilian space program has regressed to 1970s levels. The greatest nation on earth needs a Russian rocket to get astronauts in space. Some private company with a shitload of government backing does what we used to be able to do 40 years ago on our own, and now people are acting like it's the Second Coming. I suspect that our oligarchy has decided that it's better to wait for Corporate America to figure out how to do with we already knew in the first place.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Oh for goodness sake... governments pay companies to do things. It's normal, it happens all the time. (Ford makes police cars, for example.) Even when the government "does it themselves" there are usually contractors involved. The difference here is that the deals with SpaceX and Orbital are more hands-off than the old ones with Boeing and Lockheed. (And also cheaper -- Flacon 9 costs a lot less than Atlas V or Delta IV.)
Fascism, from my understanding, originally meant a system where the government controls corporations. It has more recently come to mean a system where corporations control the government, or a system where individuals have litte or no freedom. Regardless, none of these really has much to do with the contract SpaceX is working under. Yes the government is heavily involved (helping pay for development in addition to the launches themselves, etc), but compared to traditional contracts it's a step away from corporations being intertwined with government.
successful flight.
Contrary to what is being claimed, Dragon hasn't manage to complete a full mission without serious problems. Not to mention it hasn't manage to suvive a landing without either crashing in the ocean or receiving significant damage.
Guess why you haven't seen a single picture of video of the re-entry of a Dragon capsule.
SpaceX hasn't managed a single flight without having mayor errors. 100% of their flight had either being a catastrophic failure or a partial failure. They haven't completed a single mission without failing one or two of their total tasks.
They no longer have a 90% rate of failure, but it still over 70% failure rate. Something that is unacceptable even under the lowest of standards.
What's this note on the air lock? What the - we were in! They didn't even bother to hail us! Frakkin' SpaceX, I'm sick of this shit!
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Dragon hasn't manage to complete a full mission without serious problems.
Dragon has delivered the cargo to ISS as contracted on every flight it's been launched on. That's what we call 'success' in the business world. Which were the 'serious problems' on this flight, exactly?
Not to mention it hasn't manage to suvive a landing without either crashing in the ocean or receiving significant damage.
Uh, you do realize it's supposed to, you know, land in the ocean at the moment, and didn't just happen to miss where it was supposed to land?
Guess why you haven't seen a single picture of video of the re-entry of a Dragon capsule.
Because, uh, there's no-one on board to take such pictures?
Wow, the level of intelligence on Slashdot has dropped since I stopped coming here much.
Why do you neo-cons scream against private space when it is not in your district, and this is a fraction of the costs of your SLS solution?
You scream about the profits on this, and yet, $/KG is less than what Russia, OSC, Shuttle, SLS, Atlas, Delta, Ariane 5, China, etc would charge. IOW, this is working the way it is supposed to by lowering the costs of space travel.
So, what do you neo-cons/tea* types have against private space? Seriously.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Keep in mind that Griffin persuaded a republican congress to support COTS for cargo delivery. Now, it was O that keeps this, along with human launch systems, going, though house republicans are working to kill off the HUMAN LAUNCH portion, not the cargo.
Yes, the house republicans have had NO ISSUES with send 2B to Russia to launch humans, but they object to spending 1B to create 3 American companies that can/will launch humans. Why? Because it will compete against their SLS.
What is amazing is that the house republicans would support Communists and invasions of other nations, then to support our own American companies.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Well, obviously, u are moderating, and are afraid to put your real name down, but I would have to say that the original poster was spot on, since that is exactly what has been going on. The house republicans have worked to gut American human launch.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This is 100% correct. The vast majority of ISS, shuttle, etc. was in fact done by NASA. Of course, that left the hard work to the private industry.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Since it's intended for space walks, why the ${IMPRECATION} does it needs legs?
I was going to say 'why on Earth', but that's kind of the point. It's not going to be on Earth. It's going to be in zero-gravity, where legs are completely useless.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Because, uh, there's no-one on board to take such pictures?
I was with you until this piece of utter cretinism...there are people like, you know, *outside* any reentering spacecraft who could take photos or video of the re-entry, like people like, you know, on like the ground and stuff with you know, like telescopic lenses and stuff like that, you know?
As for the level of intelligence comment..it always goes up when you leave.
Corporations being in the government is fascism. A government buying things from a corporation is just business as usual. Or do you think it's a sign of creeping nazism that the government doesn't fuel its fire trucks exclusively from government-owned refineries?
And, frankly, we should all be happy that space flight is starting to de-orbit from heights of expense only a government can afford and enter the sphere of what a company - and eventually an individual - might.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Look, if there was no profit, he wouldn't do it.
Think of it like this:
Possible outcomes assuming no profit: Elon looks at the deal, and the possible outcomes are: #1SpaceX is wildly successful, and breaks even. SpaceX is wildly successful and loses money because of unforeseen costs. SpaceX fails, and Elon loses most of his wealth. SpaceX succeeds but doesn't run a surplus/profit, can't set anything aside, and years down the road, a launch fails and there is no reserve funds to get them through the hard times and failure happens eventually. Elon loses interest, never starts SpaceX, because he doesn't foresee the profit to launch his own rockets to jump start space colonies because governments don't want to do it themselves, and the US space industry continues to rot.
Guess why you haven't seen a single picture of video of the re-entry of a Dragon capsule.
Actually there are buckets of photos of recovered capsules. And the first one, I believe, was even donated to the Smithsonian.
Since every CRS flight has returned experiments and samples from ISS, if they failed to reenter properly, SpaceX wouldn't have received payment.
http://www.parabolicarc.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/dragon_ocean_crs1.jpg
http://seradata.com/SSI/wp-content/uploads/mt/flightglobalweb/blogs/hyperbola/2012/10/30/dragon%20crs1%20small.jpg
http://www.pddnet.com/sites/pddnet.com/files/KRT-US-NEWS-SPACEX-LAUNCH-3-LA.jpg
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
i think he meant inside.
So instead of just doing it themselves they write a check to Elon Musk to do it who then pockets a sizable chunk of your tax dollars as profit.
The cargo is going to the ISS anyway. Instead it could have been put onboard an unmanned version of the Orion spacecraft that U.S. taxpayers have already spent over $10 billion to develop (with its SLS launcher... earlier it should have been the Ares-1 which also had several billion dumped into developing and only flew once before being cancelled).
The point is that NASA has tried but is singularly incapable of being able to accomplish this task right now. Instead, the money goes to Russia, which is the only real choice right now. Is it better to give the money to Elon Musk or a bunch of Russian oligarchs?
This. At least when Boeing was suckling from government teat using government engineers, launching from government land and employing publicly-educated engineers, it didn't have the gall to advertise that "Boeing successfully delivers...", just collect the money.
Oh really? Boeing has never bragged about its connections to NASA and its accomplishments in space?
I guess you learn something new every day.
Gee, maybe the agency that needed it's services and couldn't do it itself?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
For the same reason the Canadarm does... to anchor it to various points on the vehicle.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Keep in mind that Russia is still sending supplies up to the ISS via the Proton cargo modules... including missions subsidized by the U.S. taxpayers as well.
Be careful about painting all House Republicans with the same brush. While there are certainly some either misguided or even flagrantly ignorant members of that caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives with regards to space policy issues, there are some like Dana Rohrabacher who genuinely do understand the benefits of open competition for launch services and the potential of commercial spaceflight. It doesn't hurt that his district covers the Hawthorne, California manufacturing plant of SpaceX (thus technically one of his constituents), but he talked about these issues even before that part of LA County was incorporated into his district too.
Ignorance of these space policy issues cuts across the aisle as well, where Gabby Giffords (previously the chair of the space sub-committee in the House) was openly hostile to these notions as well and did everything she could to thwart the Obama administration on space policy issues. That she was a Democrat didn't seem to matter, nor did it matter to Nancy Pelosi who could have done something about that too.
This issue of space policy and support of private commercial spaceflght is definitely not a right vs. left or Democrat vs. Republican issue.
Mod parent up!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
SpaceX hasn't managed a single flight without having mayor errors. 100% of their flight had either being a catastrophic failure or a partial failure. They haven't completed a single mission without failing one or two of their total tasks.
They no longer have a 90% rate of failure, but it still over 70% failure rate. Something that is unacceptable even under the lowest of standards.
How the hell do you calculate 70% failure rate for SpaceX? You ought to see how many Atlas rockets were fired before one even cleared the launch tower.
Mussolini created modern fascism, but his definition was both stupid and misleading. First, in any modern state government will always be intertwined with corporations because the state is the executive committee of the biggest corporations. That's not fascism, that's just capitalism working as intended. It becomes fascism when it removes all opposition, eliminating them first from the streets and then physically. And even then there are a few distinctions between just murderously oppressive states and fascist states.
Taking money from the people and putting it in the pockets of the elite just because they're strong is fascism
We take from the average to give to the rich because of some patriotic vision of manifest destiny, that's fascism.
You're pretty creative with your definitions of fascism. You may not like these things (and neither do I) but calling everything you dislike "fascist" is the old trap the Left fell in, in the seventies. It didn't work out all that well. It's also an argument used by entrepreneurs to defend themselves whenever their compatriots plunder the locals. "Oh, it's fascism, really it is! But it's not us doing it, we're allright" (the No True Scotsman argument in reverse).
You also trip lightly over the consequences of your words. If it were fascism, then we would have to take up arms and kill them, to avoid being killed ourselves. Well, that attitude recently got us a few political murders. A heaven-sent gift for the hawks advocating repression and horribly counterproductive. And if that isn't the consequence of something being fascism, then what's your plan of action? Petition them? Ask them nicely?
To summarize: you haven't a clue what fascism is. It's not people being "not nice" to others. It's about the physical destruction of a large part of the majority of the population, mainly aimed at their organisations and their organisers. It means bodies lying in the streets, knocks on the door at 4am, death squads and all that crap. It means that anyone suspected of being different is imprisoned, killed or terrorized into hiding.
Comparing that to "Elon Musk gets money from the government so we're living in fascism" is silly.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Normally, I scream about the neo-cons/tea*. BUT, to be fair, it is the house republican party that is causing the issues. Interestingly, the tea* speaks for private space, but they continue to support the SLS and taking money from private space.
And Dana, Like Dr. Griffin, has done wonders for private space. He would be a strong supporter of it even if it was not in his district.
And Giffords, along with the dem from Maryland that pushes the NGT, Have been the only 2 dems that have been hostile towards private space. In general, dems have supported BOTH SLS and Private space. Now, to be honest, I view the neo-cons/tea* as being the worst approach for trying to kill off private space, BUT, the dems are just wasting money and are gutless wonders. Make no mistake. Just because I speak out against neo-cons/tea*, does not mean that I support the idiot dems.
And sald, private spaceflight is our best way to not only drop the price of cost to space, but also to turn space into a money maker. That is why I continue to push for federal support of Bigelow Aerospace. They can build a space station in LEO with say 6-8 ppl on-board (ideally, NASA will have 2 ppl on it), and then land a base on the moon by 2020. I have NO DOUBT that if we have a base on the moon in which just about any nation will be allowed there, then private space will make a tonne of money. Just about every nation will want to spend the 50-100 million to put one of their own on the moon for say 2-4 months.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.