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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."
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.
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.
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.