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NASA Approves SpaceX's Crew Dragon For March 2 Unmanned Flight To the ISS (theverge.com)
NASA and SpaceX have agreed to move forward with the first unmanned test flight of SpaceX's new passenger capsule, the Crew Dragon. It is set to launch on March 2nd out of Cape Canaveral, Florida. "If the capsule successfully makes it to orbit, SpaceX will be one crucial step closer to putting the first humans on board its spacecraft," reports The Verge. From the report: This flight, called Demonstration Mission-1, or DM-1, is a major milestone for NASA's Commercial Crew program, an initiative to send NASA astronauts to the International Space Station aboard private vehicles. Since the Shuttle program ended, NASA has relied on Russia to ferry its astronauts to and from low Earth orbit -- an expensive arrangement that limited the types of missions NASA could run. But soon, US astronauts could be launching on US-made vehicles once again, as NASA did during the Space Shuttle era.
For the program, both SpaceX and rival company Boeing, have been developing new capsules to transport NASA astronauts to and from low Earth orbit. NASA wants the two companies to send these vehicles to space first, empty, before putting people on board. Boeing's vehicle, the CST-100 Starliner, is set to fly uncrewed for the first time this April. But SpaceX's Crew Dragon has been at Cape Canaveral since December, ready to fly. SpaceX even tested out the engines on the Falcon 9 rocket it plans to use to carry the capsule to orbit. The company just needed NASA's approval to make it happen. NASA tentatively set the March 2nd date a few weeks ago, and now that the okay has been given, SpaceX is just a week away from the big flight. The capsule is set to fly at 2:48AM ET from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida -- an early morning launch time dictated by the International Space Station's position in orbit. If the Crew Dragon gets off the ground then, it'll stay in orbit until early morning on Sunday and then attempt to automatically dock with the space station. It will then remain at the ISS for a week before detaching early Friday morning and returning to Earth to splash down in the Atlantic Ocean near Florida.
For the program, both SpaceX and rival company Boeing, have been developing new capsules to transport NASA astronauts to and from low Earth orbit. NASA wants the two companies to send these vehicles to space first, empty, before putting people on board. Boeing's vehicle, the CST-100 Starliner, is set to fly uncrewed for the first time this April. But SpaceX's Crew Dragon has been at Cape Canaveral since December, ready to fly. SpaceX even tested out the engines on the Falcon 9 rocket it plans to use to carry the capsule to orbit. The company just needed NASA's approval to make it happen. NASA tentatively set the March 2nd date a few weeks ago, and now that the okay has been given, SpaceX is just a week away from the big flight. The capsule is set to fly at 2:48AM ET from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida -- an early morning launch time dictated by the International Space Station's position in orbit. If the Crew Dragon gets off the ground then, it'll stay in orbit until early morning on Sunday and then attempt to automatically dock with the space station. It will then remain at the ISS for a week before detaching early Friday morning and returning to Earth to splash down in the Atlantic Ocean near Florida.
I hope they don't plan to have criemer at the controls, He sure is unmanned but good luck for liftoff.
This will be exciting. I miss watching Shuttle launches on CNN (never in person).
BlameBillCosby.com
Why do you need to crew a spacecraft?
Mostly because 1) things break (often in a way not too difficult to fix manually) and 2) speed of light is insufficient. That seem to be the overwhelming reasons.
Ezekiel 23:20
-1 Clueless Fucktard
Seemingly there is no reason for these extraordinary intergalactical upsets
Only Doctor Hans Zarkhov, formerly at NASA, has provided any explanation
This morning's unprecedented solar eclipse is no cause for alarm
"Flash, Flash, I love you, but we only have fourteen hours to save the Earth!"
I can haz rocket? I can haz science?
I can haz engineering??
I can haz big NASA hat too???
No. Bad kitty. Stay off keyboard.
Where do you humans think you are going?
Up. And then back down, hopefully.
Better spent improving life here
How would you know? If you've never done it, you don't know how it improved people's lives. Many people believe that "YeeHaw!" is the highest possible aspiration for life. Are you quite sure that whatever better thing that you apparently know about is better? And why aren't you doing it? And that's before even thinking about the engineering advancements and other externalities.
Humans are error prone and make emotional decisions that cost lives.
Who are you to spend my life? Let them invest their own lives as they see fit, at least until they ask you to decide for them.
You're not ready for Flash Gordon, you're not ready for Queen. You're just Another One Riding the Bus with Weird Al.
It will be fantastic for Americans can get into space from the United States instead of having to ride with the Russians.
This will be a better, cheaper, and SAFER vehicle than the shuttle ever was.
Corporatism != Free Market
To the person entering the destination into the navigation system, please make sure you type in "ISS" and NOT "ISIS". Thank you.
and the rockets have a history of the helium tanks ruining the day.
Are you trolling or just ignorant. Probably the former, there was only one incident with the helium tanks, which was thoroughly investigated and resolved. They have had numerous sucessful launches since, and if NASA thought there was the slightest chance of it being an issue, they would never let humans aboard.
What is a "normal backup system"? It has three pairs of redundant computers (3 x 2) doing the same things, that's quite a lot of redundancy. NASA seems to be OK with it.
The only time a capsule crashed into a space station was a Soyuz into MIR - and this Soyuz was manually controlled.
SpaceX has had two failures related to helium tanks. One failed in the second stage while involved in a test on the pad, destroying the Facebook satellite. One failed in flight on the way to the ISS, destroying a replacement spacesuit, a new ISS docking adapter, and lots of supplies and experiments.
That being said, I presume the earlier poster is a Boeing or Lockmart troll, since they seem to be behind an anti-SpaceX FUD campaign that's been underway for years. The truth us that both the Atlas and Delta families of rockets which the Falcon is rendering obsolete have had a huge number of failures over their lifetimes and both were completely funded by taxpayers. Both of those launch vehicles got the benefit of decades of taxpayer funding as they were revised and improved to the point that the current versions of both have excellent safety records, but their makers do not get to pretend that the huge number of failures from early in their development never happened while simultaneously bragging about the long track records of success.
> No. Bad kitty. Stay off keyboard.
https://www.bitboost.com/pawse...