I said anticipated. That means there is absolutely nothing being considered by any country or any organization which has the actual capability of sending stuff into space that is going to replace this aspect of the Space Shuttle. I'm not saying that it won't ever happen.
And no, a big inflatable aeroshell on the Falcon Heavy could do the same job either, but nice try. Besides, nobody is actually planning such a cumbersome device that has no precedence in human spaceflight. Not saying it couldn't be done, but it isn't being done nor being considered. If you have some crystal ball or better yet some actual hard source of information stating that such a device or spacecraft is being considered, I'd really like to know about it. Seriously, I would.
The down mass capabilities of the Shuttle have not been replaced nor is it anticipated that it will ever be replaced within this century. That is one thing which the retirement of the Space Shuttle definitely hurt.
The only problem with that 2009 article is that Dragon Heavy still hasn't been built, tested or flown and is behind schedule.
Tested or flown perhaps, but the hardware for the Falcon Heavy (not the "Dragon Heavy") is most definitely built. Pad work has been done at Vandenberg AFB and the test stand for testing the 27 Merlin-1 engines simultaneously is under construction at the McGregor testing facility. That is perhaps the next piece of big news which is going to come from SpaceX when those engines fire on that test stand (something that will be hard to hide from any of the residents of Waco, Texas).
The first flights are not expected to be using the cross-feed system, which is going to cut performance but can still test the overall design and concept.
You also can't ignore the Skylab 2, 3, & 4 missions that all used Apollo hardware as well as the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (something that arguably paved the way for the ISS in terms of cooperation between the Soviet Space Agency and NASA). All of those missions also flew in the 1970's.
It is a pity that the manned mission to Venus never happened, which was also supposed to use Apollo hardware and something very similar to Skylab for extended mission resources. It could have happened for the price of a single shuttle mission too.
Mr. Carmack's relationship was inherited from ID Software. If Zenimax saw the value of Mr. Carmack when they bought the company, of course that new contract would have its own terms and conditions.
I seriously doubt you have a copy of that contract, and considering the position that Mr. Carmack had at ID Software it is very doubtful it was a "standard" work-for-hire contract as well. It was very likely a custom contract with a whole bunch of exceptions and signing off on the part by lawyers for Oculus Rift, Zenimax, and those personally representing John Carmack.
My understanding is that Zenimax and Oculus Rift never did settle upon the formal employment terms, which is one of the reasons why John Carmack left Zenimax in the first place.
The offers were about a joint project between OR and Zenimax, which John Carmack was going to be the lead developer for that project. That Zenimax decided it wasn't worth their effort should be perhaps a bit more understandable other than trying to figure out what role John Carmack was going to have without any sort of joint project on the horizon. Zenimax was insisting Mr. Carmack work full-time for them and he told them to go to the proverbial hell and simply left Zenimax altogether.
That was the point where I think Zenimax might be in trouble as had they insisted upon a formal IP settlment at that time, their case would be a whole lot more solid right now. Coming back several months later now that a couple billion dollars are on the table with OR really makes it seem like they are trolling rather than any actual concern about their intellectual property rights.
One of the projects that Mr. Carmack was working on at ID Software was to incorporate Oculus Rift technology into ID games. That very well could require some coding that would involve ID "intellectual property" that could in turn be rolled into at least the Oculus development kit API.
As to if Zenimax owns the API of Oculus, I thought that had some other legal precedence that sort of frowned upon this kind of behavior?
Zenimax owns Carmack's work while he was on their clock..
That gets real tricky with a guy who was actually working at three different businesses at the same time and spent time in three (or more... I don't know John Carmack personally) physical offices. It also depends on the contract that Mr. Carmack actually signed with Zenimax, or rather the contract that Zenimax inherited when they took over ID Software. ID seemed fine with the idea that Mr. Carmack could work at both places at the same time and had previously agreed upon his work with Armadillo Aerospace where I presume there was some sort of either informal or formal agreement for separation of intellectual property. In other words, I really doubt you could make a case that Zenimax owns the intellectual property rights to Pixel, Project Morpheus, or the Stig.
No doubt if Armadillo Aerospace suddenly became very profitable they would like to try this same stunt with John Carmack for those spacecraft, thus it really is in Mr. Carmack's interest to nail this down hard and tell Zenimax to take a hike with a judge backing him up.
The fly in the ointment here is the agreement that ID Software had, even if just verbal promises, about intellectual property rights for these side projects that he clearly was involved with outside of the company. The other thing that really mucks stuff up is that John Carmack was a major owner/investor in ID Software and lost that position when Zemimax took over the company. In other words he turned from being a shareholder/partner into a mere employee, and it is possible that Zenimax didn't cross all of their t's and dot i's to get that put down in writing what his exact status was... nor ever nailed that down when they gave Mr. Carmack the shove out the door telling him to get lost.
This is definitely not the same situation as a typical work-for-hire that most salaried engineers find themselves in except if they were one of the co-founders of the company in question.
It would be nice if such acceleration actually applied to human endeavors and logistics. I think the 4 launches per 8 months is likely the best you are going to see from SpaceX for awhile until they get pad 39A finished and/or the Brownsville site.
The reflight of their 1st stage will simply not happen before the end of the year. Period. They are struggling far too much to simply get the current manifest going at the moment. Besides, SpaceX has an aggressive program with their Falcon 9R test project in New Mexico to perform well before they get a 1st stage ready for full reflight after landing a couple stages and then tearing them apart for engineering studies if they are even successful at landing those stages.
SpaceX doesn't even have clearance from the FAA-AST to land the 1st stage on land, nor is there any location at KSC for them to put the stage down. SpaceX is trying to find a spot and the Cape Canaveral Air Station staff is performing an assessment as to where they could put a landing pad for SpaceX to use, but let's see that built first before any further speculation as to a time table for when it might be used. The bureaucratic paper mill to get that landing pad will take more than a year alone, and that doesn't even include construction and FAA-AST certification for a process that simply lack regulations of any kind (yet more of a delay for just that).
Don't get me wrong, SpaceX will get that going with the progress they've been making, and I'm not trying to suggest SpaceX will fail with their landing attempts, just that it is going to take a whole lot more time to get all of that accomplished. Three to five years from now will we see the 1st stages reused? That is something I could see. Ten years from now that they could routinely be used for crewed flights perhaps as well. I wouldn't expect anything like that done earlier.
Unfortunately with rocket development you deal with hard realities due to physics and the rocket equation. Those are things that Congress routinely tries to ignore and unfortunately don't really result in a usable rocket if they are ignored for other political considerations.
Khrushchev at least recognized he needed to give Sergei Korolev the money needed to put stuff into space, but then again even the Soviet Union fell to political games, hence at least one of the reasons why the N1 program (aka the "moon rocket" that should have put Russian cosmonauts on the Moon) fell apart and killed so many people. That disaster is still counted as one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in human history.
At least NASA and especially Werner Von Braun never had to deal with that kind of disaster.
The ISS was never about the science. That was a very distant afterthought and more of an excuse to slap on the appropriations legislation and to give a cover of legitimacy for why the money needed to be spent.
The real point of the ISS was to act as a "vehicle" to transfer orbital construction experience gained by the Soviet Union during the construction of the Almaz and Mir space stations and get NASA engineers into Star City to really pick apart how the Soviet Union made that equipment. Of significant importance was the idea of keeping rocket scientists in the broken up Soviet Union, at that point the Russian Federation, very busy with projects that they would not be tempted to build ICBMs for North Korea or Iran.
Perhaps spending $100-$150 billion to keep Los Angeles or Seattle from becoming a nuclear cinder was a good idea, and having NASA researchers basically get a blank check to explore in detail the entire Soviet space program is certainly of some major value. Post-Soviet Russia certainly was willing to open their archives and show almost everything.... at a price and a price NASA was willing to pay.
The numerous failed attempts to replace the Space Shuttle is something that should get some attention though, and the singular failure of NASA to come up with something besides the Shuttle is definitely something that should be shouted from every political soapbox. It is am embarrassment that all NASA can come up with is the SLS and Orion architecture.
In the near future will SpaceX reuse their launchers? Not likely, but it really doesn't matter. Even treating the Falcon 9 as a purely expendable vehicle is still cheaper than what any of their competition can do for sending people and cargo into space.
The only thing that is really biting SpaceX hard in the behind at the moment is simply their lack of clearing their manifest and crazy mishaps like the Helium leaks and problems they are facing right now to get their next launch into the sky. It should have happened about a week ago but apparently was a larger problem than anybody expected.... discovered during a "static fire" test where the whole rocket was tested at KSC in a dress rehearsal prior to launch.
At this point, I think a "disasterous failure" would be an "abort to orbit" scenerio where multiple engines fail just before orbital insertion. Critics would call it a failure but the SpaceX PR team would call it a success and everybody would be bitching about it for years.
The reason why SpaceX was founded in the first place is because the Russians at first agreed to sell an ICBM to Elon Musk, then later renigged on the agreement saying that he was just a stupid idiot who didn't really want to get into space in the first place and to leave that to people smarter than himself.
Yeah, this is very personal for Elon Musk, where undercutting the Russians so horribly that they are stuck only with Russian national security launches is sort of a personal goal.
In my last 37 years of experience in the space industry, "reusable" means "costs more per launch" in every single example. I haven't worked man-rated programs directly, but the goals are often similar between the two, but the Design Assurance Level for man-rated prevents re-use of components.
The question is how that reusability is being performed. I would at least suggest to look at the Grasshopper & Falcon 9R program to respond so far as what reusability will bring in the context that SpaceX is proposing.
If there had to be a difference, it is because SpaceX is depending on the resue of the Falcon 9 to cut its operating costs.... either to increase profits or to increase its market share (and SpaceX has been doing plenty of both at the moment). They have a clear incentive for getting the launch costs down, something that is not as important with a cost-plus contract procured under base-line budgeting where any cost savings in a government program results in a lower budget the following year. There is a definite disincentive on the part of program managers to reduce actual costs in most government run programs.
That is also true for almost any other endeavor that the government is working in, but spaceflight only makes it much more pronounced.
The disposable service module on the Dragon is not habitable and in fact can't be serviced from inside of the capsule. About the only thing it really has is just solar panels... not even RCS fuel tanks or thrusters.
The Shenzhou and Soyuz both have habitable modules that contain food, life support, and even scientific experimental hardware (when applicable) that astronauts use when in orbit. It is a bit different than what the Dragon has.
Sure, both Russia and China are capable of building something like the Dragon for reentry, but SpaceX is the only organization which has bothered. The point of this sub-thread is bitching about how expensive the U.S. federal government is paying for hauling cargo back from the ISS and saying there are obviously cheaper ways to get it done. If those alternative approaches exist, show it! Regardless, even at the heavily inflated price of $16k/kg of cargo that the OP asserted is being charged by SpaceX for cargo to the ISS, it still is cheaper than the $25k-$30k/kg that the Space Shuttle program cost taxpayers (at conservative low-ball price estimates for shuttle costs too). That was also the only other vehicle capable of bringing back large amounts of cargo from space, but there is no way that will ever fly again in the future as it is firmly retired and all of the infrastructure to get a shuttle into orbit completely dismantled.
The only real units IMHO are Plank units, but even those aren't useful for practical everyday applications.
BTW, you don't need to worry about unit conversions unless you are using different subsystems from different countries or manufacturers that aren't using the same units. It really doesn't matter what you are using even if it is centifurlonghs per microfortnights for velocity. While done as more or less a practical joke, the microfortnight was used by VMS in its timing circuits and used for various accounting purposes. It shows up in MS Windows as a portion of the VMS thread accounting system is a part of the kernel (under license from DEC from a long time ago).
The term "ton" is widely used by many cultures and is a hold-over from earlier mass-weight units. If you want to call it a megagram, that is your call, but the widespread and common usage is still "metric ton" by both governments and especially industrial users. If you want to put on blindfolds and pretend that such units don't exist, that is your own problem and you will be laughed out of many conferences by being such a stupid stick in the mud about such silly things.
Go ahead and be a purist if you want, the rest of the world will continue to exist and go on its merry way. Complaining on Slashdot isn't going to change the world either.
No, the extra cargo that can be returned other than some cosmonauts is about 100 kg. Most of the life support for the Soyuz is also in the "orbital module" part that is left behind in space... part of what gives both the Shenzhou and Soyuz spacecraft its very distinctive shape and how it looks very different from the Orion/Apollo/Dragon capsules that don't have separate parts.
Keep in mind that the Soyuz and Shenzhou spacecraft have two parts: the re-entry capsule and the life support "orbital" module that are docked together on the launch pad. That orbital part is ejected before re-entry and simply burns up in the atmosphere, with the remaining air in the Soyuz capsule being more than sufficient for the couple of minutes needed for actual re-entry.
This Soyuz system did give the Soviet Space Agency (they were the Soviet Union at the time) some problems and unfortunate deaths because the door between these two modules was not secured properly. That has been fixed though.
BTW, I am not disputing that the Soyuz and the Shenzhou return people. What I am pointing out is that they are the only spacecraft besides the Dragon at the moment which can return anything from space. Get a clue here and actually read what I said.
Most of the early flights of the Dragon (including this CRS-3 flight) have been flying low value cargo to the ISS. Mainly food and consumables (spare parts, batteries, a few laptops, and other small stuff) that if it was lost wouldn't necessarily be all that important. As you've mentioned, this is also somewhat bulky, but there has been spare room left over. That is why one of the surprises that SpaceX sent up was some ice cream (a very rare treat in space) and a few bags of snack food that wasn't on the formal manifest that NASA wanted to have shipped up.
The later flights are supposed to be sending up more expensive equipment and devices that are also a whole lot heavier, but NASA is gaining trust with the fact that SpaceX can deliver the intended payloads on a timely manner too.
The COTS program never even required hauling cargo back from orbit. The contract was strictly for sending stuff up to the ISS, not for returning anything (which is why the Cygnus spacecraft doesn't have re-entry capabilities). SpaceX threw the re-entry capabilities on as an extra and offered it to NASA,which NASA is certainly using.
That the Dragon is the only vehicle currently in production which is capable of returning more than a hundred kilograms of stuff from orbit (that is the Soyuz spacecraft, where I suppose more cargo could come back at the expense of one crew member), it seems like a smart decision on the part of SpaceX too. Other than the Soyuz spacecraft, I suppose there is the Shenzhou spacecraft that the Chinese are flying that could also return cargo, but the Dragon still runs circles even around that vehicle.
For vehicles that have gone into space and currently being used, that is it though. The Shenzhou, the Soyuz, and the Dragon are the only vehicles capable of returning any payloads from space. The Dragon is the only one that measures its return payload in metric tons.
People landed on the Moon with pounds, feet, gallons, and other "Imperial" measurement units. It is possible to do these things and not need the Metric system. Hell, they landed on the Moon using slide rules which performed most of the calculations and for those things that needed faster computations, NASA needed to invent a real-time operating system (something that didn't even exist prior to NASA's use of the OS).
Don't get me started on how silly the metric system is too. It has its use and is widely used, but it also has a number of limitations and shortcomings. I certainly wouldn't blame the crash of the Mars Orbiter strictly on a supposed backwardness of NASA engineers because they happen to use different units than the ones you apparently are used to using.
That is two metric tons or in other words about 2000 kg. 1000 kg == 1 metric ton, which is also about 2200 lbs or roughly close to a standard "short ton".
Interesting. The above links seem a little underwhelming to me as it looks more like a simplification of the form factor where Tesla clearly doesn't need to swap out individual cells in their battery packs, so it definitely makes sense. I'll trust you so far as actual chemistry changes are happening too, although it sounds like Tesla could still make some money supplying standard "AA" cells for military applications if they have the extended temperature range and a few other improvements being claimed.
Just how ubiquitous these cells have become in our society is very hard to see until you start pulling some stuff apart and seeing them in far more places than you would have originally imagined. Still, it is nice to see that Tesla is not just sitting on their hands and instead really trying to improve every part of their vehicle. They've definitely come a long way since it was just a dozen guys in a random Silicon Valley garage with a blank sheet of paper trying to come up with the design of the Roadster.
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I said anticipated . That means there is absolutely nothing being considered by any country or any organization which has the actual capability of sending stuff into space that is going to replace this aspect of the Space Shuttle. I'm not saying that it won't ever happen.
And no, a big inflatable aeroshell on the Falcon Heavy could do the same job either, but nice try. Besides, nobody is actually planning such a cumbersome device that has no precedence in human spaceflight. Not saying it couldn't be done, but it isn't being done nor being considered. If you have some crystal ball or better yet some actual hard source of information stating that such a device or spacecraft is being considered, I'd really like to know about it. Seriously, I would.
The down mass capabilities of the Shuttle have not been replaced nor is it anticipated that it will ever be replaced within this century. That is one thing which the retirement of the Space Shuttle definitely hurt.
The only problem with that 2009 article is that Dragon Heavy still hasn't been built, tested or flown and is behind schedule.
Tested or flown perhaps, but the hardware for the Falcon Heavy (not the "Dragon Heavy") is most definitely built. Pad work has been done at Vandenberg AFB and the test stand for testing the 27 Merlin-1 engines simultaneously is under construction at the McGregor testing facility. That is perhaps the next piece of big news which is going to come from SpaceX when those engines fire on that test stand (something that will be hard to hide from any of the residents of Waco, Texas).
The first flights are not expected to be using the cross-feed system, which is going to cut performance but can still test the overall design and concept.
You also can't ignore the Skylab 2, 3, & 4 missions that all used Apollo hardware as well as the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (something that arguably paved the way for the ISS in terms of cooperation between the Soviet Space Agency and NASA). All of those missions also flew in the 1970's.
It is a pity that the manned mission to Venus never happened, which was also supposed to use Apollo hardware and something very similar to Skylab for extended mission resources. It could have happened for the price of a single shuttle mission too.
Mr. Carmack's relationship was inherited from ID Software. If Zenimax saw the value of Mr. Carmack when they bought the company, of course that new contract would have its own terms and conditions.
I seriously doubt you have a copy of that contract, and considering the position that Mr. Carmack had at ID Software it is very doubtful it was a "standard" work-for-hire contract as well. It was very likely a custom contract with a whole bunch of exceptions and signing off on the part by lawyers for Oculus Rift, Zenimax, and those personally representing John Carmack.
My understanding is that Zenimax and Oculus Rift never did settle upon the formal employment terms, which is one of the reasons why John Carmack left Zenimax in the first place.
The offers were about a joint project between OR and Zenimax, which John Carmack was going to be the lead developer for that project. That Zenimax decided it wasn't worth their effort should be perhaps a bit more understandable other than trying to figure out what role John Carmack was going to have without any sort of joint project on the horizon. Zenimax was insisting Mr. Carmack work full-time for them and he told them to go to the proverbial hell and simply left Zenimax altogether.
That was the point where I think Zenimax might be in trouble as had they insisted upon a formal IP settlment at that time, their case would be a whole lot more solid right now. Coming back several months later now that a couple billion dollars are on the table with OR really makes it seem like they are trolling rather than any actual concern about their intellectual property rights.
One of the projects that Mr. Carmack was working on at ID Software was to incorporate Oculus Rift technology into ID games. That very well could require some coding that would involve ID "intellectual property" that could in turn be rolled into at least the Oculus development kit API.
As to if Zenimax owns the API of Oculus, I thought that had some other legal precedence that sort of frowned upon this kind of behavior?
Zenimax owns Carmack's work while he was on their clock..
That gets real tricky with a guy who was actually working at three different businesses at the same time and spent time in three (or more... I don't know John Carmack personally) physical offices. It also depends on the contract that Mr. Carmack actually signed with Zenimax, or rather the contract that Zenimax inherited when they took over ID Software. ID seemed fine with the idea that Mr. Carmack could work at both places at the same time and had previously agreed upon his work with Armadillo Aerospace where I presume there was some sort of either informal or formal agreement for separation of intellectual property. In other words, I really doubt you could make a case that Zenimax owns the intellectual property rights to Pixel, Project Morpheus, or the Stig.
No doubt if Armadillo Aerospace suddenly became very profitable they would like to try this same stunt with John Carmack for those spacecraft, thus it really is in Mr. Carmack's interest to nail this down hard and tell Zenimax to take a hike with a judge backing him up.
The fly in the ointment here is the agreement that ID Software had, even if just verbal promises, about intellectual property rights for these side projects that he clearly was involved with outside of the company. The other thing that really mucks stuff up is that John Carmack was a major owner/investor in ID Software and lost that position when Zemimax took over the company. In other words he turned from being a shareholder/partner into a mere employee, and it is possible that Zenimax didn't cross all of their t's and dot i's to get that put down in writing what his exact status was... nor ever nailed that down when they gave Mr. Carmack the shove out the door telling him to get lost.
This is definitely not the same situation as a typical work-for-hire that most salaried engineers find themselves in except if they were one of the co-founders of the company in question.
It would be nice if such acceleration actually applied to human endeavors and logistics. I think the 4 launches per 8 months is likely the best you are going to see from SpaceX for awhile until they get pad 39A finished and/or the Brownsville site.
The reflight of their 1st stage will simply not happen before the end of the year. Period. They are struggling far too much to simply get the current manifest going at the moment. Besides, SpaceX has an aggressive program with their Falcon 9R test project in New Mexico to perform well before they get a 1st stage ready for full reflight after landing a couple stages and then tearing them apart for engineering studies if they are even successful at landing those stages.
SpaceX doesn't even have clearance from the FAA-AST to land the 1st stage on land, nor is there any location at KSC for them to put the stage down. SpaceX is trying to find a spot and the Cape Canaveral Air Station staff is performing an assessment as to where they could put a landing pad for SpaceX to use, but let's see that built first before any further speculation as to a time table for when it might be used. The bureaucratic paper mill to get that landing pad will take more than a year alone, and that doesn't even include construction and FAA-AST certification for a process that simply lack regulations of any kind (yet more of a delay for just that).
Don't get me wrong, SpaceX will get that going with the progress they've been making, and I'm not trying to suggest SpaceX will fail with their landing attempts, just that it is going to take a whole lot more time to get all of that accomplished. Three to five years from now will we see the 1st stages reused? That is something I could see. Ten years from now that they could routinely be used for crewed flights perhaps as well. I wouldn't expect anything like that done earlier.
Unfortunately with rocket development you deal with hard realities due to physics and the rocket equation. Those are things that Congress routinely tries to ignore and unfortunately don't really result in a usable rocket if they are ignored for other political considerations.
Khrushchev at least recognized he needed to give Sergei Korolev the money needed to put stuff into space, but then again even the Soviet Union fell to political games, hence at least one of the reasons why the N1 program (aka the "moon rocket" that should have put Russian cosmonauts on the Moon) fell apart and killed so many people. That disaster is still counted as one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in human history.
At least NASA and especially Werner Von Braun never had to deal with that kind of disaster.
The ISS was never about the science. That was a very distant afterthought and more of an excuse to slap on the appropriations legislation and to give a cover of legitimacy for why the money needed to be spent.
The real point of the ISS was to act as a "vehicle" to transfer orbital construction experience gained by the Soviet Union during the construction of the Almaz and Mir space stations and get NASA engineers into Star City to really pick apart how the Soviet Union made that equipment. Of significant importance was the idea of keeping rocket scientists in the broken up Soviet Union, at that point the Russian Federation, very busy with projects that they would not be tempted to build ICBMs for North Korea or Iran.
Perhaps spending $100-$150 billion to keep Los Angeles or Seattle from becoming a nuclear cinder was a good idea, and having NASA researchers basically get a blank check to explore in detail the entire Soviet space program is certainly of some major value. Post-Soviet Russia certainly was willing to open their archives and show almost everything.... at a price and a price NASA was willing to pay.
The numerous failed attempts to replace the Space Shuttle is something that should get some attention though, and the singular failure of NASA to come up with something besides the Shuttle is definitely something that should be shouted from every political soapbox. It is am embarrassment that all NASA can come up with is the SLS and Orion architecture.
In the near future will SpaceX reuse their launchers? Not likely, but it really doesn't matter. Even treating the Falcon 9 as a purely expendable vehicle is still cheaper than what any of their competition can do for sending people and cargo into space.
The only thing that is really biting SpaceX hard in the behind at the moment is simply their lack of clearing their manifest and crazy mishaps like the Helium leaks and problems they are facing right now to get their next launch into the sky. It should have happened about a week ago but apparently was a larger problem than anybody expected.... discovered during a "static fire" test where the whole rocket was tested at KSC in a dress rehearsal prior to launch.
At this point, I think a "disasterous failure" would be an "abort to orbit" scenerio where multiple engines fail just before orbital insertion. Critics would call it a failure but the SpaceX PR team would call it a success and everybody would be bitching about it for years.
The reason why SpaceX was founded in the first place is because the Russians at first agreed to sell an ICBM to Elon Musk, then later renigged on the agreement saying that he was just a stupid idiot who didn't really want to get into space in the first place and to leave that to people smarter than himself.
Yeah, this is very personal for Elon Musk, where undercutting the Russians so horribly that they are stuck only with Russian national security launches is sort of a personal goal.
In my last 37 years of experience in the space industry, "reusable" means "costs more per launch" in every single example. I haven't worked man-rated programs directly, but the goals are often similar between the two, but the Design Assurance Level for man-rated prevents re-use of components.
The question is how that reusability is being performed. I would at least suggest to look at the Grasshopper & Falcon 9R program to respond so far as what reusability will bring in the context that SpaceX is proposing.
If there had to be a difference, it is because SpaceX is depending on the resue of the Falcon 9 to cut its operating costs.... either to increase profits or to increase its market share (and SpaceX has been doing plenty of both at the moment). They have a clear incentive for getting the launch costs down, something that is not as important with a cost-plus contract procured under base-line budgeting where any cost savings in a government program results in a lower budget the following year. There is a definite disincentive on the part of program managers to reduce actual costs in most government run programs.
That is also true for almost any other endeavor that the government is working in, but spaceflight only makes it much more pronounced.
The disposable service module on the Dragon is not habitable and in fact can't be serviced from inside of the capsule. About the only thing it really has is just solar panels... not even RCS fuel tanks or thrusters.
The Shenzhou and Soyuz both have habitable modules that contain food, life support, and even scientific experimental hardware (when applicable) that astronauts use when in orbit. It is a bit different than what the Dragon has.
Sure, both Russia and China are capable of building something like the Dragon for reentry, but SpaceX is the only organization which has bothered. The point of this sub-thread is bitching about how expensive the U.S. federal government is paying for hauling cargo back from the ISS and saying there are obviously cheaper ways to get it done. If those alternative approaches exist, show it! Regardless, even at the heavily inflated price of $16k/kg of cargo that the OP asserted is being charged by SpaceX for cargo to the ISS, it still is cheaper than the $25k-$30k/kg that the Space Shuttle program cost taxpayers (at conservative low-ball price estimates for shuttle costs too). That was also the only other vehicle capable of bringing back large amounts of cargo from space, but there is no way that will ever fly again in the future as it is firmly retired and all of the infrastructure to get a shuttle into orbit completely dismantled.
The only real units IMHO are Plank units, but even those aren't useful for practical everyday applications.
BTW, you don't need to worry about unit conversions unless you are using different subsystems from different countries or manufacturers that aren't using the same units. It really doesn't matter what you are using even if it is centifurlonghs per microfortnights for velocity. While done as more or less a practical joke, the microfortnight was used by VMS in its timing circuits and used for various accounting purposes. It shows up in MS Windows as a portion of the VMS thread accounting system is a part of the kernel (under license from DEC from a long time ago).
The term "ton" is widely used by many cultures and is a hold-over from earlier mass-weight units. If you want to call it a megagram, that is your call, but the widespread and common usage is still "metric ton" by both governments and especially industrial users. If you want to put on blindfolds and pretend that such units don't exist, that is your own problem and you will be laughed out of many conferences by being such a stupid stick in the mud about such silly things.
Go ahead and be a purist if you want, the rest of the world will continue to exist and go on its merry way. Complaining on Slashdot isn't going to change the world either.
No, the extra cargo that can be returned other than some cosmonauts is about 100 kg. Most of the life support for the Soyuz is also in the "orbital module" part that is left behind in space... part of what gives both the Shenzhou and Soyuz spacecraft its very distinctive shape and how it looks very different from the Orion/Apollo/Dragon capsules that don't have separate parts.
Keep in mind that the Soyuz and Shenzhou spacecraft have two parts: the re-entry capsule and the life support "orbital" module that are docked together on the launch pad. That orbital part is ejected before re-entry and simply burns up in the atmosphere, with the remaining air in the Soyuz capsule being more than sufficient for the couple of minutes needed for actual re-entry.
This Soyuz system did give the Soviet Space Agency (they were the Soviet Union at the time) some problems and unfortunate deaths because the door between these two modules was not secured properly. That has been fixed though.
BTW, I am not disputing that the Soyuz and the Shenzhou return people. What I am pointing out is that they are the only spacecraft besides the Dragon at the moment which can return anything from space. Get a clue here and actually read what I said.
Most of the early flights of the Dragon (including this CRS-3 flight) have been flying low value cargo to the ISS. Mainly food and consumables (spare parts, batteries, a few laptops, and other small stuff) that if it was lost wouldn't necessarily be all that important. As you've mentioned, this is also somewhat bulky, but there has been spare room left over. That is why one of the surprises that SpaceX sent up was some ice cream (a very rare treat in space) and a few bags of snack food that wasn't on the formal manifest that NASA wanted to have shipped up.
The later flights are supposed to be sending up more expensive equipment and devices that are also a whole lot heavier, but NASA is gaining trust with the fact that SpaceX can deliver the intended payloads on a timely manner too.
The COTS program never even required hauling cargo back from orbit. The contract was strictly for sending stuff up to the ISS, not for returning anything (which is why the Cygnus spacecraft doesn't have re-entry capabilities). SpaceX threw the re-entry capabilities on as an extra and offered it to NASA,which NASA is certainly using.
That the Dragon is the only vehicle currently in production which is capable of returning more than a hundred kilograms of stuff from orbit (that is the Soyuz spacecraft, where I suppose more cargo could come back at the expense of one crew member), it seems like a smart decision on the part of SpaceX too. Other than the Soyuz spacecraft, I suppose there is the Shenzhou spacecraft that the Chinese are flying that could also return cargo, but the Dragon still runs circles even around that vehicle.
For vehicles that have gone into space and currently being used, that is it though. The Shenzhou, the Soyuz, and the Dragon are the only vehicles capable of returning any payloads from space. The Dragon is the only one that measures its return payload in metric tons.
People landed on the Moon with pounds, feet, gallons, and other "Imperial" measurement units. It is possible to do these things and not need the Metric system. Hell, they landed on the Moon using slide rules which performed most of the calculations and for those things that needed faster computations, NASA needed to invent a real-time operating system (something that didn't even exist prior to NASA's use of the OS).
Don't get me started on how silly the metric system is too. It has its use and is widely used, but it also has a number of limitations and shortcomings. I certainly wouldn't blame the crash of the Mars Orbiter strictly on a supposed backwardness of NASA engineers because they happen to use different units than the ones you apparently are used to using.
With spaceflight (and SpaceX specs) it is metric tons.... but still about the same amount of mass/weight.
That is two metric tons or in other words about 2000 kg. 1000 kg == 1 metric ton, which is also about 2200 lbs or roughly close to a standard "short ton".
But it still is measuring mass.
Interesting. The above links seem a little underwhelming to me as it looks more like a simplification of the form factor where Tesla clearly doesn't need to swap out individual cells in their battery packs, so it definitely makes sense. I'll trust you so far as actual chemistry changes are happening too, although it sounds like Tesla could still make some money supplying standard "AA" cells for military applications if they have the extended temperature range and a few other improvements being claimed.
Just how ubiquitous these cells have become in our society is very hard to see until you start pulling some stuff apart and seeing them in far more places than you would have originally imagined. Still, it is nice to see that Tesla is not just sitting on their hands and instead really trying to improve every part of their vehicle. They've definitely come a long way since it was just a dozen guys in a random Silicon Valley garage with a blank sheet of paper trying to come up with the design of the Roadster.