31–40 of 260 posts
We are a small step closer inhabiting Mars. When we will, it will be the most important event in the five billion years history of our solar system. In other words, we are witnessing some pretty cool stuff.
Currently they have problems with the voice between ISS and Dragon. There is a huge interference and they can't read it. Funny enough we the viewers hear it loud and clear
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First three times I tried doing it by eye and ended up hopelessly lost. Needed to pull out my trigonometry to figure out how to line up the capsule to get the Y/Z aligned...
I got it on the first try, but only because I've got 600+ hours of Kerbal Space Program under my belt (where docking is much harder when you consider that docking in KSP entails actually getting to the target and doing it with imbalanced RCS thrusters that I placed on the craft willy-nilly; SpaceX's online docking sim was a breeze in comparison). Trick was to get rotation aligned first, then worry about translation.…
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Can’t tell if serious or troll. Successful human spaceflight on reusable hardware > lower cost to orbit of personnel > increased economic activity in orbit > construction of manufacturing facilities > scale up of materials, capability, endurance and knowledge > ability to construct and launch Mars ships and supply a colony Or something like that.
Lower cost to orbit, sure. Increased economic activity in orbit? Where does that part come from? It's not like we haven't sent people to the ISS before. And it's not like SpaceX hasn't managed to reuse hardware before. It's basically just a mix of those two things. Really the most significant things about this were that astronauts were launched to space from the US and it was a private company. And out of those, the…
Currently they have problems with the voice between ISS and Dragon. There is a huge interference and they can't read it. Funny enough we the viewers hear it loud and clear
I'm sure an easy workaround would be to use Houston as a relay rather than direct communication.
I wonder how reuse affects the math, and what they’ll be able to do to lower those prices further. Obviously the optics on getting a domestic launch for half the price makes it an easy sale for Congress, but we were all hoping for more. An order of magnitude reduction might have gotten us 20x as many launches.
Docking begins to occur around 3:10PM GMT in the video. This link may send you to that point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIZsnKGV8TE&t=695m0s
Is there an easy way to link to a specific time in live videos? I had to manually play around with the time to find the right point.
1. Why only two astronauts? and
2. How much is Crew Dragon costing?
For (1), it's stated [1] that Crew Dragon has a capacity of seven astronauts but only 4 for NASA? How does that work? Does that mean the NASA configuration only has 4 seats? I found this [2] saying seats 1 and 4 were empty.
Why not 4 astronauts? The answer seems to be that this is technically a test flight (Crew Demo-2). Passing this will fully certify Dragon. I guess it's better to risk 2 astronauts than 4. It probably also depends how many people you want to have on the ISS.
As for (2), I found this [3], which states the cost at $55m per astronaut. This seems... high? A full complement of 4 would cost $210m. Falcon 9 launches cost a fraction of that. Even Falcon Heavy is ~$90m.
For some reason I thought SpaceX was enabling sending up 7 astronauts for Compared to Soyuz [4], which cost NASA $80m/astronaut, that's a saving but not as much as I would've thought.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_2
[2]: https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew/2020/05/30/all-aboard-...
[3]: https://www.space.com/spacex-boeing-commercial-crew-seat-pri...
[4]: https://www.wired.com/story/spacex-launched-two-astronauts-c...