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SpaceX Aces First Launch of Crew Dragon, Built to Carry Humans, and Falcon 9 Touchdown (cnn.com)
"SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule, its first spacecraft designed to carry humans, took flight for the first time Saturday," reports CNN.
Slashdot reader Applehu Akbar calls it "a perfect launch," noting the test flight is hauling a sensor-loaded dummy named "Ripley" -- plus a 400-pound cargo of essentials for the International Space Station. Crew Dragon will dock on Sunday, CNN reports, then return to earth five days later. "SpaceX's capsule is now en route to the International Space Station, which flies about 254 miles above Earth at tremendous speeds: about 10 times faster than a bullet."
The successful launch puts SpaceX one step closer to a historic landmark: Crew Dragon could be the first commercially built spacecraft to carry NASA astronauts to orbit. And Crew Dragon -- along with a capsule called Starliner built by Boeing -- could end the United States' decade-long reliance on Russia for human spaceflight...
This marks the first and only demo mission that Crew Dragon will fly without humans on board. If all goes well, the capsule design will undergo a few more reviews and safety checks, and it could be ready to fly two NASA astronauts to the space station in July, based on the space agency's current timeline.
Space.com reports that the reusable rocket also landed safely back on earth about 10 minutes after the liftoff, "acing a touchdown on the SpaceX drone ship Of Course I Still Love You, which was stationed off the Florida coast."
Slashdot reader Applehu Akbar calls it "a perfect launch," noting the test flight is hauling a sensor-loaded dummy named "Ripley" -- plus a 400-pound cargo of essentials for the International Space Station. Crew Dragon will dock on Sunday, CNN reports, then return to earth five days later. "SpaceX's capsule is now en route to the International Space Station, which flies about 254 miles above Earth at tremendous speeds: about 10 times faster than a bullet."
The successful launch puts SpaceX one step closer to a historic landmark: Crew Dragon could be the first commercially built spacecraft to carry NASA astronauts to orbit. And Crew Dragon -- along with a capsule called Starliner built by Boeing -- could end the United States' decade-long reliance on Russia for human spaceflight...
This marks the first and only demo mission that Crew Dragon will fly without humans on board. If all goes well, the capsule design will undergo a few more reviews and safety checks, and it could be ready to fly two NASA astronauts to the space station in July, based on the space agency's current timeline.
Space.com reports that the reusable rocket also landed safely back on earth about 10 minutes after the liftoff, "acing a touchdown on the SpaceX drone ship Of Course I Still Love You, which was stationed off the Florida coast."
Money was of course, an issue, and as usual, private enterprise - and not one yet totally involved in crony capitalism, managed to deliver what the government and their heavily subsidized old-school aerospace contractors could not.
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All possible congrats, props, general hip hip hurray and so forth.
Just wish I didn't have to wait from childhood until too old to fly for this.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Does the dummy Ripley wear a T-Shirt and low riding panties too?
I doubt nearly anyone here at nerd town knows much about firearms, so that comparison is lost on them.
The sound of a firearm would send them screaming for mommy and shitting their pants.
Ripley didn't make it, and the ending was tragic. There was an xenomorph onboard.
the International Space Station, which flies ... at tremendous speeds: about 10 times faster than a bullet.
I'm taking that to the fucking bank. That's priceless.
Who writes this shit?
The screen name of the writer of the post (Applehu Akbar) is clever. The cry of Islam is "Allahu Akbar" or "God is great". The author's pen name thus means "Apple is great".
Clearly we need a new "-1, WTF was that?" moderation option.
#DeleteFacebook
Non-commercial companies? I don't get it.
You must be new around here! :)
GP has 2 points on topic; a funny reference to SpaceX dragron and rocketman but still, he got modded down offtopic.
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#SomethingPositive
"This marks the first and only demo mission that Crew Dragon will fly without humans on board."
Almost.
Next flight, without crew, is the in-flight abort test, where they launch, but shut the rocket down at about Mach one and let the excape system pull the capsule away. http://www.parabolicarc.com/20...
Then comes the first flight with crew.
Finally the next steps of human space exploration. A pity most governments are more interested in their own shady, old fashioned business, making war, or playing golf. Cudos to Musk and the team he gathers, ..!
The table in the parabolicarc site I linked says that the separation (and subsequent breakup of the booster) is at Mach 1.5 to 2.5.
Hardly.
All of the Apollo hardware was developed and built by private industry. The Saturn V and Apollo spacecraft were built by Boeing (S-IC first stage), North American Aviation (S-II second stage, Apollo command and service modules), Douglas Aircraft (S-IVB third stage), IBM (instrument unit), Grumman (lunar module), and many others (as subcontractors).
To say that the crew Dragon will be the first âoecommercialâ craft to carry astronauts ignores history.
That's right. I said tomato juice, not orange-whatever.
But congratulations for achieving this milestone! Where do I sign up for Starfleet Academy?
Shouldn't we measure this in the speed of unladen swallows?
I think a little bit of history is in order. NASA's charter was to "...provide for research into the problems of flight within and outside the Earth's atmosphere, and for other purposes." These are the first words of the legislation that established NASA in October of 1958. NASA has been delivering what NASA has promised since they opened the doors for business -- data on the problems of flight, and other purposes, like data on climate, crops, and the environment. They've had to deal with wildly divergent funding regimes, fluctuations in public opinion, and most recently, an active, directed effort by Republicans to remove science from the public policy sphere. Without NASA's research mission, there would be a far smaller set of commercial opportunities for American businesses in space. Plenty of military ones, but practically no private, commercial ones.
And Apollo? Apollo was a one-off. It should have been handled 100 percent by the military, and never darkened NASA's door. (The only non-active duty Apollo program astronaut was Armstrong, and he was still military, just not on active duty at the time.)
Ditto the STS -- Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, convinced Nixon that US intelligence agencies would need reliable access to space to combat the growing Soviet presence in orbit, so NASA was given the incompatible tasks of trying to do science and having to keep it secret at the same time. The STS was a failure, not a success, and it should be laid at Nixon/Kissinger's feet, not the US government in general, or NASA in particular.
So, no. Don't piss on NASA, or the government that created NASA. Instead, piss on the military-industrial complex that hijacked NASA for sixty years. Ironically, the same president that proposed NASA to the American people also warned against that military-industrial complex. And doubly ironic, the agency that was created simultaneously with NASA to handle the weaponization of technology, the Advanced Research Project Agency, accidentally created the Internet. Go figure.