Crew Dragon Docks with ISS

Wikipedia is either wrong or out of date but the ratios are slightly worse at 40% cheaper than Soyuz:

https://www.space.com/spacex-boeing-commercial-crew-seat-pri...

> NASA will likely pay about $90 million for each astronaut who flies aboard Boeing's CST-100 Starliner capsule on International Space Station (ISS) missions, the report estimated. The per-seat cost for SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule, meanwhile, will be around $55 million, according to the OIG's calculations.

> To put those costs into perspective: NASA currently pays about $86 million for each seat aboard Russia's three-person Soyuz spacecraft, which has been astronauts' only ride to and from the ISS since NASA's space shuttle fleet was grounded in July 2011.

I love space exploration like the next guy, but I have a massive fear that a proliferation of space-stations will lead to unpleasant situations. With all its tensions, the ISS has been an amazing tool for soft diplomacy; if we start having country-specific stations we’ll soon end up with nasty arguments. Already we have competing satellites rumoured to have classified capabilities, I hate to think what they could do with manned stations.

I guess it’s inevitable.

From NASA's Mission Updates:

> The Crew Dragon arrived at the station’s Harmony port, docking at 10:16 a.m. EDT while the spacecraft were flying about 262 miles above the northern border of China and Mongolia.

It's hard for me to wrap my brain around this. They seem so far away but 262 miles above earth is about the distance from NYC to DC which doesn't seem far at all.

Considering how long the ISS has been up there, it could be POTS or something similarly-analog. Dragon→ISS was clear, but ISS→Dragon was not, making me think that maybe there's some wire or connector in the latter direction that's shoddy (and that'd be more common for analog/POTS than digital/VOIP, where such garbling would be bidirectional and/or nothing would be heard on either end).

Then again, I ain't exactly a space telecom engineer, so what do I know? ;)

They've since switched back to RF, so apparently it ain't the end of the world.

Edited - wrong number of seats for the next mission.

NASA asked SpaceX to change the configuration of the capsule to only support 4 astronauts for two reasons. The first is that they wanted a more mellow Load profile on the passengers in the case of a high-altitude (almost orbit) abort, so they wanted the seats in a different position. The first design had the seats fixed, and the screen pivoting down above them. This design has the seats pivoting, and the screen fixed. It also drops the maximum crew from 7 to 4. I’m not sure if SpaceX will use the larger configuration for their own private configurations.

The other reason is that seven is a lot, and NASA doesn’t plan on sending that many up on a single mission.

Seats 1 and four are empty on this mission. For future missions that only have three they will remove the extra seat. That said, the capsule seems amazingly spacious, for being a capsule.

As far as costing, the contract was written similar to how NASA pays the Russians (though that number is upwards of 87 million per seat right now). SpaceX itself owns the rockets and the spacecraft - not NASA. Think of it as a airline seat.

Finally, the vast majority of cost at this point are not the hardware - but rather the cost of complying with NASA’s testing. Everyone was assuming that NASA would do what they did with commercial cargo, and simply expect the cargo to show up with a minimal number of design reviews. With commercial crew, NASA took a much more proactive approach which led to a complete redesign of the capsule (SpaceX’s original plan was simply to reuse cargo), plus many many many design reviews.

Finally SpaceX has full pricing control right now. SpaceX is running some pretty massive margins (from what I have heard) on everything - but they are flushing all of that money into the goal of getting starship and spaceship and their insane next generation engine up, as well as starlink. They have deliberately only lowered their costs below their competitors, soaking margin for a while.