61–70 of 260 posts
They mentioned something about the suit pressure for one of them being lower than expected and asked them to check for "white teeth" on 3 zippers, which they reported seeing on all 3. Can anyone explain what that is?
Sounds like when the zippers are fully closed the white teeth of the zipper should be covered by the seal around the zipper. If any teeth are visible the seal is not complete.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We now have the capability to put up another ISS today, resupply it, and staff it, at a fraction of the cost, all with launch equipment made by a single company that started a decade ago. This is the part that's exciting for me. Whether it comes in the form of more space stations like the ISS or a much bigger and reinvigorated ISS, either way is a vital step in the right direction toward making humanity less behold…
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…
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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…
Lower cost to orbit translates pretty directly to increased economic activity in orbit, since said economic activity is less expensive to do (and therefore more accessible to more people).
But agreed. This ain't a huge achievement... yet. It's essential groundwork for that achievement, though.
Watching now.. they were unable to get the "hard line" voice working. VOIP?
I was surprised they slept on the trip. I assume they took turns.
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Right? It’s basically a Tesla.
Yeah. Except autopilot is easier in space than on the road, because it doesn't have to take into account the multitudes of vehicles (and pedestrians) without an autopilot, just zooming around.
How much AI/ML do you think is running on the software associated with this launch and docking? I suspect there’s a great deal of very explicit, well tested code, but very little AI/ML.
Very little in terms of what you would consider AI or ML. It's a lot of trig and control theory. You do a lot of the math beforehand to figure out the script the craft will follow to reach the ISS. Once it gets close, you either use manual controls or let autopilot do the docking. The autopilot is basically looking some dots on a camera and firing the thrusters to make the dots line up right. It's more like a dumb PI…
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Took me 3 tries to do it; my bad was not carefully reading the instructions.
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...
One at a time move pitch, yaw, and roll to zero (with 0 velocity). Before touching any translation buttons.
Never touch the pitch yaw and roll buttons again. Start moving x, y, and z translation to zero using transnational thrusters. Make sure you zero out y and z before you get close to zeroing out x.
So when seeing this I had two questions, one of which I've found the answer to, one of which still remains a mystery. 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…
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. Thi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We now have the capability to put up another ISS today, resupply it, and staff it, at a fraction of the cost, all with launch equipment made by a single company that started a decade ago. This is the part that's exciting for me. Whether it comes in the form of more space stations like the ISS or a much bigger and reinvigorated ISS, either way is a vital step in the right direction toward making humanity less behold…
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…
They actually wanted to join the ISS effort, but were given a firm no and had no other option than to do pursue their own. [2]
I don't think we will see any other country-specific stations for a long time, but modular commercial stations that can be shared for research and potential business endeavors (hotels, specialized manufacturing, ...).
If efforts like SpaceX Starship actually succeed in very significantly lowering launch costs, that is. Right now it is simply not affordable either for nations or businesses. A single Starship would actually be a great temporary space station on it's own, comparable to the ISS in usable area.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_large_modular_space_st...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_International_...