Earlier quoted context omitted.
where did you hear that dragon 2 is not safe for humans after splashdown? that's not accurate
Can confirm it’s not accurate.
thank you for the confirmation trashaccount123
SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down After Historic Test Flight
91–100 of 152 posts
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down After Historic Test Flight
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 2 of those seats going to crew
Why exactly do you need crew taking up nearly 30% of the seats on a vessel that can provably operate without them?
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down After Historic Test Flight
#93Film...
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down After Historic Test Flight
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
SpaceX is breaking new ground, but it isn't the first corporation to launch large rockets. The Saturn 5 wasn't built by the air force, nor was shuttle constructed by Nasa. These objects were built by contractors, corporations working under government contracts. The differences between SpaceX today and the corporations that built, and largely launched, the big rockets of the past is largely a legal distinction. Space…
The big rockets of the past were in very large part designed by NASA. The contractors did have a lot of input, but NASA drew up the detailed specifications and had the final say on every aspect of the design and engineering. Different components often had different manufacturers. For example each of the three stages of the Saturn 5 had a different manufacturer and all three were designed by NASA. The first stage was…
> It really is a completely different paradigm
It has been done before; for example the Thor IRBM was a competitive bid between Douglas, Lockheed and NAA. Official specs specified the equipment to be carried but the bidders designed their own airframes and launch facilities.
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down After Historic Test Flight
#95So I'm a fan of spacex in the sense that they're taking an atraditional approach to space exploration and colonization. However, our current ride to space has been operating reliably since 1978, we've been building and sending large space stations up since the early 70s. Spacex only very recently got their closed cycle engine working, the pinnacle of rocket efficiency, catching up to, again, early 1970s Russian techn…
We sent people to the Moon decades ago for roughly a billion dollars per astronaut (adjusted for inflation). That's the incremental cost, not even including development costs. It's no wonder we never went back to the Moon, it wasn't sustainable. Even crewed spaceflight in general has been questionably sustainable. The ISS cost over $100 billion to assemble.
SpaceX has been driving not just innovation but a much faster pace of innovation. Landing rockets, reusing rocket stages of orbital launchers, developing crewed spacecraft on a budget roughly an order of magnitude cheaper than the way government procurement works. Etc, etc, etc. Ten years ago there had been zero Falcon 9 launches. Today the Falcon 9 makes up the majority of commercial orbital launch traffic, has flown over 60 times, has been landed over 20 times, and has been reused nearly 20 times. And the pace is accelerating. They're working on new engines, new vehicles, new ideas. All of which has dramatically shaken up spaceflight and opened up the possibility of a new space age where access to space is a lot cheaper and more routine than it has been.
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down After Historic Test Flight
#96I am so damn proud of what SpaceX has accomplished!
At the same time, it just seems a bit lame to watch this whiplashing splash down in the ocean with parachutes instead of a perfectly smooth VTOL landing on a pad.
Particularly as the chutes seems to billow and twist, one seemed to trade positions with another which I’m sure is fine but in the moment seemed worrisome, and the craft bobbing and twisting at the end of the ropes...
Is the ultimate longer term plan a Dragon that can land properly under its own power?
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down After Historic Test Flight
#97I am so damn proud of what SpaceX has accomplished! At the same time, it just seems a bit lame to watch this whiplashing splash down in the ocean with parachutes instead of a perfectly smooth VTOL landing on a pad. Particularly as the chutes seems to billow and twist, one seemed to trade positions with another which I’m sure is fine but in the moment seemed worrisome, and the craft bobbing and twisting at the end of…
They thought about it, but no, the ultimate long term plan is that huge shining steel starships will take off and land on the same pad carrying lots more people or cargo. Some things are easier when you’re bigger.
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down After Historic Test Flight
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
The vomit-comet ICBM video? I'm a big fan of SpaceX, but I think they'll get to Mars before governments on Earth allow that concept to happen. Your passengers do multiple g's to altitude, then go weightless, then go back to taking g-forces on descent. That's the vomit part. Not a great customer experience. Meanwhile, the Starship looks like an ICBM to every early warning radar on the planet. It's only during reentry…
Ok, I did some rough math. The W88 has a diameter of 55cm, a length of 175cm, and a blast yield of 475 kilotons. The unpressurized cargo hold of the Starship per Wikipedia is 88m^3, and the diameter of the vehicle is 9m. Let's assume that the unpressurized cargo hold is a cylinder 9m in diameter with a length of 9m. It looks like a hold of that size could fit 15 units per 200cm length, or 60 units, with space for str…
Or they have ability to strike back no matter what.
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down After Historic Test Flight
#99I am so damn proud of what SpaceX has accomplished! At the same time, it just seems a bit lame to watch this whiplashing splash down in the ocean with parachutes instead of a perfectly smooth VTOL landing on a pad. Particularly as the chutes seems to billow and twist, one seemed to trade positions with another which I’m sure is fine but in the moment seemed worrisome, and the craft bobbing and twisting at the end of…
They thought about it, but no, the ultimate long term plan is that huge shining steel starships will take off and land on the same pad carrying lots more people or cargo. Some things are easier when you’re bigger.
Apparently the SuperDracos have the necessary thrust and fuel to bring Dragon to a stop from terminal velocity, Dragon just lacks the landing gear.
So then why not use that to slow down just before a splash down?
Perhaps if you throttle them down to the point where the G-force is reasonable, the losses to gravity add up too quickly and you run out of thrust. Too bad :-(
Re: SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down After Historic Test Flight
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
SpaceX actually showed a mock-up of what point-to-point travel might look like in one of their videos.
The vomit-comet ICBM video? I'm a big fan of SpaceX, but I think they'll get to Mars before governments on Earth allow that concept to happen. Your passengers do multiple g's to altitude, then go weightless, then go back to taking g-forces on descent. That's the vomit part. Not a great customer experience. Meanwhile, the Starship looks like an ICBM to every early warning radar on the planet. It's only during reentry…
Let's also not forget about the climate impact of turning rockets into business class travel. It's pretty ridiculous. If we want any change and chance for this planet we should squash initiatives like this in the butt.