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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.
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)
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
Hmm... The gist of this is essentially correct, except for one detail. Cost. The only number that is really going to matter in the end is how much money does it take to put 1 ton of stuff into orbit (or beyond) from the ground. Right now it appears to be $10,000,000 USD or even much higher (based on the numbers I see being thrown around on Slashdot). Government subsidies (such as in Russia), can hide some of this, but this seems to be the essential economic truth. As long as that remains the case, mankind is not going to be a space faring race and venturing into space will mostly be for kicks and bragging rights (and maybe a bit of good science, such as Hubble). What SpaceX offers for the very first time, is a path where we may reduce these costs by a factor of ten or more. If we can start putting a ton of stuff into space for less than $500,000 it will radically change what is possible -- a cost of doing something real goes from $200 trillion to maybe $10 trillion -- something we could spend over a 100 years. Things like real space stations, and large space ships with landing vessels.
Forty-three years later, private industry figures out how to send a rocket up there. With taxpayers footing the bill.
Unlike every previous launch, however, we the taxpayers are paying a fixed price to SpaceX, instead of the bloated cost-plus contracts that are large part of the reason why there hasn't been much progress in manned spaceflight in the last four decades. Not all of the free-market claims about government inefficiency are nonsense - the previous contractors (all "private industry", loosely defined) had no incentive to develop reusable rockets, because the government just kept paying for new ones.
Some private company with a shitload of government backing does what we used to be able to do 40 years ago on our own
This is missing the point entirely. All of the past NASA rockets were also built by private companies with a shitload of government backing. Unlike those companies, SpaceX does not have a blank check; Musk's goal is to be both inexpensive and profitable. Maybe it won't work, but at least someone is trying for a change.
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.
I think the legs attach to things on the outside of the ISS, so it'll basically crawl around like a two-legged spider or something.
And sure, you could have a free-floating robot that maneuvers with thrusters, but that's just too complicated. (Plus it would need refueling.)
Because back in the 70s, NASA was landing rovers the size of SUVs on Mars
Viking landers
And had orbiters around Saturn
Pioneer 11
And a mission to Pluto.
(JPL Voyager FAQ)
And probes in interstellar space
No, but let's not forget that the probes that are in interstellar space now were launched in the 1970s. The next comparable probe (New Horizons) wasn't launched until 2006. Quite a gap, no?
Or, convince me that without the initial public investment, any private company would have done the basic research required to send the first satellite into space.
It's not my job to convince you that the private sector would have magically brought about the space age without government intervention, because that isn't what I'm arguing in the first place. Sure, there are lots of examples of technology invented (or aggressively developed) by governments - pretty much anything with military utility, in particular, which includes computers, the Internet, radar, jet engines, and especially anything to do with space. The key detail here is that most of these eventually developed independently and became consumer technologies, rather that continuing to be government programs indefinitely. Yes, this means that private companies eventually get rich because of public sector investment; it's also what makes it possible for us to be having this argument right now. Without Colossus or ENIAC, there would be no iPhone, but if computers and the Internet had been managed like manned spaceflight was, there wouldn't be an iPhone either.
The other important and essential outcome is that it needs to be not just profitable but sustainable; continuing to pour billions of taxpayer dollars into something that never gets cheaper is anything but. SpaceX has already made unmanned launches cheaper; the shuttle program lasted for three decades and it was still hideously expensive when it ended.
The reason this is exciting news is that it's real progress towards making manned space travel yet another consumer technology. Maybe it won't work, or maybe it will only ever be affordable by large companies and the rich; I don't expect to be personally taking any rocket trips before I die. But the same could have been (and probably was) said about airplanes a century ago, and I was never going to be able to ride on the space shuttle either. At least someone is trying to change the way things are done, and doing a decent job of it so far. So what if SpaceX piggybacking off years of government investment? If their business model works, at least we won't have to continue wasting money on something that should have been commodified decades ago, and NASA will be able to focus on science and basic research (and stretch their budget further). Everyone wins.
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.
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.
Well, it's theoretically less expensive, but not yet. If you extrapolate out 50 missions, you start seeing SpaceX making an actual profit instead of a projected profit based on a fee stream.
Hmmm. Russia would charge us 200 million to launch progress to the ISS with 2.3 tonnes and no return.
SpaceX charges us 120 million to launch dragon with 3.3 tonnes up and 2.5 tonnes back.
And Russia WAS the cheapest going.
So, yeah, I would say that it is in fact, less expensive.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Well, SPaceX's F9 currently has the world's best record of 100% success (though one 2nd ary payload failed, but that was due to NASA not allowing a longer burn time). As such, I know that I would be happy to ride F9 up.
Heck, by the time that dragon rider launches next year with humans, F9 will have gone up more than 20 x. I think that it more then enough.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Alas, no. The NASA work on the space stations was limited to design studies that were limited to 'this is what we want a space station to do, and this is the space we have to do it in".
When it came to the engineering part of the design, McDonnell Douglas did Skylab and various companies did ISS (hell, ISS had parts from other countries, much less from outside NASA).
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.