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SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

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Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#71
post #6

Fantastic, very impressive. But somewhere inside (my little star-wars/trek spirit), I wish that it was not so tricky. That we all could just travel and explore the universe. Everybody always talk about how difficult it is in space and how much better earth is. Wish the debate would be more about all the possibilities in space or on other planets. What can we do with zero gravity? For all the bad things with living on…

The first commercial space manufacturing application is likely to be ZBLAN, a super pure fiber optic. When made in microgravity it has superior optical properties. It's extremely expensive, $450k to $1m per kg.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experime...

https://sites.google.com/site/cmapproject/case-studies/exoti...

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#72
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now we can keep X% of the knowledge of humanity on a portable device. That should help.

Unless that device breaks? What hardware that we have today will still work in 100 years? Books you can make it happen. Phones are broke within 10. Desktops within 20.

We’re perfectly capable of building electronics that can run for many tens of years without issue… it’s just that such things don’t get built because that’s not profitable for manufacturers. If an organization like NASA puts in an order for computers or handheld devices specifically designed to not break for long stretches of time, it wouldn’t be a problem to fulfill said order.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#73
post #45
post #6

Fantastic, very impressive. But somewhere inside (my little star-wars/trek spirit), I wish that it was not so tricky. That we all could just travel and explore the universe. Everybody always talk about how difficult it is in space and how much better earth is. Wish the debate would be more about all the possibilities in space or on other planets. What can we do with zero gravity? For all the bad things with living on…

But all the industrial scale processes we use require gravity, plenty of liquid water or solvents and a LOT of other infrastructure in place. Sure, you could pack up some tools in 10 ships 500 years ago and could start a colony in a hospitable part of Earth. I'm convinced you cannot bootstrap a colony in an unhospitable place in the Solar System without ships 3-4 orders of magnitude above what we have today.

That's because it's the only way we currently know. I'm no materials scientist, but how many novel methods of making materials in microgravity will we discover in the next few decades? Or new, better materials.

It's all conjecture obviously. The point is that we probably don't need to carry all our heavy tools and infrastructure up there- we just need to find new (hopefully better) ways of creating the stuff we need.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#74
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The commercial crew missions by both Boeing and SpaceX are new and interesting for a number of reasons: - This will be one of the first vehicles developed by a private entity to launch people into space, rather than a nation. That represents a huge step "down" the ladder of who has access to space. First, it's only nations. Later, it's large companies and entities. Down the line a little bit medium-sized companies wi…

Isn't your first point the natural development of things? As example: Which tank or fighter jet is NOT produced by a private entity today?

I think it is the natural development of things!

Just because something is a natural development doesn't mean we don't get to be excited when it happens.

I think airplanes becoming a mode of mass transit were a natural development. It probably seemed like a pretty exciting development as that transition was happening.

Similarly, once you have computers it seems natural to develop a global interconnected network of them. I was pretty excited when that was taking off!

Also, just because the ordering is natural doesn't mean the timing is natural. We've expected these kinds of developments to happen in space for a long time. But we didn't know when they would happen. It was thought that this change might happen in the 70's or 80's. Others thought it might be as far off as 2040 or 2050.

The fact that we're seeing some real tangible evidence of progress _now_ is super exciting.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#75
post #17
post #2

Do you ever wonder how people felt when they say Magellan or Captain Cook set off? Or, when they watched the Apollo missions happen? I'm guessing that this is what it felt like. We're at the dawn of a new space age.

I've felt that about SpaceX ever since seeing the Grasshopper testing videos. Up until that point, if a rocket slowed down during takeoff something had gone horribly wrong. Then it just... hovered... and landed, and I realised this was the start of a new era of space travel. The Falcon Heavy launch is still the highlight for me but this one is probably more important, simply because it's so normal and routine now and…

Up until that point, if a rocket slowed down during takeoff something had gone horribly wrong.

Just in case anyone is unaware of the most notable exception:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC-X

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IWIv2MKcyg

DC-X has been a major inspiration and proof-by-example for commercial reusable rocket efforts. Its technical achievements and focus on aircraft-like low-cost operations showed a path out of (or into?) the darkness.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#76
post #2

Do you ever wonder how people felt when they say Magellan or Captain Cook set off? Or, when they watched the Apollo missions happen? I'm guessing that this is what it felt like. We're at the dawn of a new space age.

Soyuz takes people to the space station every few months, has done for years. Why is this specific mission new?

Well, for one, the Soyuz can only carry a crew of 3, whereas Crew Dragon can potentially carry up to 7, and is designed specifically (for NASA's purposes) for carrying 4. This alone adds significant flexibility to the crew levels of the station. Since the end of the Shuttle era the ISS has been stuck at only 6 crew, precisely the number that can come up and return on 2 soyuz capsules. With the addition of Crew Dragon in the mix it'll be possible to support 7 crew members on the station with just 1 Dragon and 1 Soyuz capsule. The ISS requires a lot of maintenance and routine tasks, even adding one crew member would significantly increase the amount of science they're able to do on the station.

Also, increasing the diversity of crew transfer vehicles is very helpful. Right now there are 4 different varieties of cargo vehicles that visit the station (Progress, HTV, Cargo Dragon, and Cygnus). This diversity means that delays or periods of downtime with any one of the cargo delivery systems can be made up for via the others, as has happened in the past. The same resiliency has not existed for some time in regards to crew transfer vehicles. Given that there was a failure during an attempt to launch a Soyuz capsule last year which put a serious strain on the station (potentially putting it in jeopardy of being left uncrewed for some time) you can see that this is a serious issue.

Additionally, Crew Dragon is the first new crewed spacecraft to visit the station that was designed within the last decade, or, indeed that was designed this century. Soyuz is reliable but it has a great many constraints and shortcomings, many of which can't be alleviated without moving to a new design. It's refreshing to see that we as a species still have the capability to build new crewed vehicles with new capabilities and new designs rather than simply shuffling about as custodians of legacy vehicles designed and built by previous generations.

Even more excitingly, the Crew Dragon was launched by a vehicle which landed the first stage, and will have its first stage be reused on a future flight. The Soyuz rocket/capsule is a remarkably inexpensive way for crew to get to orbit, but those low costs are due mainly to sticking with an old design (all the R&D has long been amortized) and reliance on inexpensive Russian labor. Falcon 9 is already cost competitive with the Soyuz and has the potential to be even cheaper as Falcon 9 first stage reuse becomes more common. As reusable rockets become more common and familiar, and as their design improves with increasing use and follow-on generations (Blue Origin's New Glenn, SpaceX's BFR/Starship, etc.) costs will continue to fall and access to space will open up. Which will bring about a new space age where many more people visit orbit per year, space stations become much larger and more advanced, and our capabilities in spaceflight are in general much greater than they are today.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#77
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we all wait to start anything in Mars when it is too late for our planet, well... humans won’t be around anymore. Think about Mars as redundancy site for the human race.

What event are you thinking of which will make Earth less hospitable than Mars? Supervolcano? Asteroid?

All those plus climate changes, lunatics in power, etc.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#78
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we all wait to start anything in Mars when it is too late for our planet, well... humans won’t be around anymore. Think about Mars as redundancy site for the human race.

But our "redundancy site" is awful for human life. Imagine if we just worked on fixing up the place we live on already that has air we can breathe, abundant liquid water, and isn't inundated with deadly radiation. We will need to leave Earth in 5 billion years when the sun goes red giant. 5 billion years is an INCREDIBLE amount of time. Things we do in 2019 will have zero influence on those times. It is much more lik…

> It is much more likely we annihilate ourselves with nuclear weapons or global climate change and pollution way before then

That’s the point.

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#79
post #64

Nice that it went flawlessly, the first stage landed back well, and they reached the ISS a bit ahead of time. They even did some intentional back and forth maneuvers to test the dragon. Do they need more tests before the manned flight?

They still need to do an in-flight abort test, which i'm super excited for. They are going to send the whole thing up a second time (I believe they will be using this EXACT Crew Dragon capsule after it comes back down), but this time they will abort the launch mid-flight around max Q which will trigger the capsule to eject safely away from the explosion behind it. It's going to be quite the sight, and if everything g…

Everyone on /r/spacex keeps flip-flopping on this, but there have been indications SpaceX will try to recover the first stage after the abort.

Should be interesting either way!

Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Docks with International Space Station

#80
post #18

I'm sitting on my couch, just idly watching live footage of some people doing stuff 200 miles above me. Above the place I will spend the entirety of my life. Watching them do complicated things that, if we're lucky and don't destroy ourselves first, will ensure our species becomes multi-planetary. Maybe even space faring someday. Life is weird.

As far as I understand there is still some time before humanity becomes interplanetary in any meaningful way, maybe even many generations. And what is going on so far these days is mostly about not regressing.
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