Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live by salt water. Salt water destroys everything. Sometimes quickly but always eventually. Ok, maybe not fish.
Carbon steel hull ships traverse saltwater for many decades however.
What's their maintenance like?
SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down After Historic Test Flight
31–40 of 152 posts
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down After Historic Test Flight
#32Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down After Historic Test Flight
#33This is a better article on the recovery than the one I linked from TechCrunch. I would like to reiterate the point made before which is that SpaceX is on the verge of being in a place that no company has ever been before with regard to space. The are on the cusp of having a capsule that they can send into orbit for days and then return to Earth. They already have rockets capable of putting tons of material into ever…
Why would they do day trips when they plan to do suborbital passenger trips. Not make going into space a bucket list item for the upper middle class, but a routine A-to-B for business class flyers. The bucket list item would be Mars.
I would assume free cash flow would be the reason. Let's assume that you could get $20M per seat on a 7 seat dragon with 2 of those seats going to crew and the other 5 going to paying passengers. You, launch them on a re-usable F9 which you currently charge $80M for a non-reusable booster flight into low orbit. Could you clear 25 - 35 million in margin on that? Could you do that for doing "nothing" special other than having the gear ready? Clearly we'd need way more visibility into their operational costs but if you could generate 250 - 300M$ per year that was not from fixed price contracts I think that would be a helpful thing from a money management perspective.
They still might not do it, but I don't think the sub-orbital passenger trips are very close. So many "other people" have to get involved before that is real, like treaties with the world about how you regulate overflights, or tariffs, or do air traffic control, or who pays when your rocket augurs into the innocent village, Etc. There are lots of details there, whereas Roscosmos has already done tourist flights to the ISS, and with their own launch facilities most of the variables would be under SpaceX's ability to control.
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down After Historic Test Flight
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are unlikely to do this at this point. The big problem is that while the capsule will be reusable, since NASA killed the propulsive landing for Dragon 2, it now needs to splash down in saltwater and therefore is not considered safe for humans after the first use. This makes Dragon 2:s too expensive for large-scale space tourism. Unless there is suddenly a huge market for this, I think SpaceX would prefer to sell…
Any news on this? I was super, super disappointed this mission did have a propulsive landing. I'm just now finding out it was nixed entirely. But that's fine for NASA if they want to pay for a splash down? If somebody else wants to pay for propulsive landing, it's on the table? EDIT: Sounds like a SpaceX driven decision.
As I understand it, originally SpaceX was planning on using propulsive landing with side-mounted thrusters and legs coming through the heatshield (i.e. what was planned for Dragon 2) on Mars, so they were developing the technology with that end in mind.
Once they decided to go straight to Starship/BFR with the movable 'wings' and raptor engines on the bottom and cancelled the dragon missions to Mars, there was less reason to go though the huge amount of work to finish developing and qualifying dragon-style propulsive landing. NASA was never super happy with it and Dragon was designed to do water landings with parachutes in case the thrusters failed anyway, so it wouldn't have been too much work to make that the only option.
This has lead to a strange situation where it seems Boeing's Starliner has ended up being more reusable than Dragon as it comes back onto land... But if they get Starship going, all this will be irrelevant.
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down After Historic Test Flight
#35How do they plan to land it when humans are aboard?
Into the ocean just like the test. This is how it is always done with the exception of the space shuttle program I believe.
In terms of capsule spacecraft, by volume of recoveries, mercury/gemini/apollo using the ocean are actually a statistical anomaly compared to the total number of successful land based Soyuz + Shenzhou recoveries.
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down After Historic Test Flight
#36This is a better article on the recovery than the one I linked from TechCrunch. I would like to reiterate the point made before which is that SpaceX is on the verge of being in a place that no company has ever been before with regard to space. The are on the cusp of having a capsule that they can send into orbit for days and then return to Earth. They already have rockets capable of putting tons of material into ever…
Why would they do day trips when they plan to do suborbital passenger trips. Not make going into space a bucket list item for the upper middle class, but a routine A-to-B for business class flyers. The bucket list item would be Mars.
SpaceX actually showed a mock-up of what point-to-point travel might look like in one of their videos.
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down After Historic Test Flight
#37This is a better article on the recovery than the one I linked from TechCrunch. I would like to reiterate the point made before which is that SpaceX is on the verge of being in a place that no company has ever been before with regard to space. The are on the cusp of having a capsule that they can send into orbit for days and then return to Earth. They already have rockets capable of putting tons of material into ever…
They are unlikely to do this at this point. The big problem is that while the capsule will be reusable, since NASA killed the propulsive landing for Dragon 2, it now needs to splash down in saltwater and therefore is not considered safe for humans after the first use. This makes Dragon 2:s too expensive for large-scale space tourism. Unless there is suddenly a huge market for this, I think SpaceX would prefer to sell…
> NASA killed the propulsive landing for Dragon 2
Are you sure NASA was to blame for it? I remember Elon saying they are not perusing propulsive landing anymore because of the amount of resources it would take to develop and validate the design. From what I gather, it was SpaceX's decision.
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down After Historic Test Flight
#38This is a better article on the recovery than the one I linked from TechCrunch. I would like to reiterate the point made before which is that SpaceX is on the verge of being in a place that no company has ever been before with regard to space. The are on the cusp of having a capsule that they can send into orbit for days and then return to Earth. They already have rockets capable of putting tons of material into ever…
I wonder at which point we will start worrying about the carbon footprint of these launches, though. I didn't do the math, but it seems it might become a global factor once you get to multiple launches per week.
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down After Historic Test Flight
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's their maintenance like?
Scrub/repaint every few years? In comparison, splashdown capsules spend maybe few hours tops in the water.
The problem is that, unlike ships, they're generally not designed to be water proof. It's not the exterior that's the problem.
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down After Historic Test Flight
#40This is a better article on the recovery than the one I linked from TechCrunch. I would like to reiterate the point made before which is that SpaceX is on the verge of being in a place that no company has ever been before with regard to space. The are on the cusp of having a capsule that they can send into orbit for days and then return to Earth. They already have rockets capable of putting tons of material into ever…
I wonder at which point we will start worrying about the carbon footprint of these launches, though. I didn't do the math, but it seems it might become a global factor once you get to multiple launches per week.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/spacex-environ... says:
> if the SpaceX’s plan for a rocket launch every two weeks comes to fruition, this amount of carbon (approximately 4,000 tonnes per year) will rapidly become a bigger problem
So, that gives us a number... and it's also very weird for the Smithsonian to describe that as a "problem". 4,000 tonnes per year is about a thousand cars worth per the EPA's numbers (https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...) - pretty much a drop in the bucket.