Splashdown of Crew Dragon DM-1 | Hacker News Reader

Splashdown of Crew Dragon DM-1

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75 pointsjamesknelson26 comments

Meanwhile, in Boca Chica...

https://twitter.com/TheFavoritist/status/1104023515630571531

"Starhopper is being moved right now! Most likely going to the launch pad in Boca Chica."

I remember back in the day watching videos of the Grasshopper going up and down and thinking impressive, but they're just going to disappear like 99% of other tech companies that do impressive demos.

I'm glad to be eating my hat, and to reminded that perennially '10 years away' tech does occasionally make it to market.

They did the work of getting there incrementally. Small, then big. Expendable, then landable. Cargo, then crew.

Yes, they got here incrementally, but then any journey is done one step at a time.

At the time of Grasshopper the whole idea of a reusable private rocket was 10 year away tech.

I just went to check the Grasshopper dates, thinking it would be about 10 years to first successful landing. Grasshopper started testing in 2012, so my mentions of '10 years away' are definitely metaphorical.

Indeed.

What I'm probably most excited about is Gwynne Shotwell's (President and COO of SpaceX, very level-headed, DEFINITELY not someone who indulges in 'Elon time') prediction and confidence that Starship will start transporting passengers point to point within 10 years: https://www.inverse.com/article/44830-spacex-s-shotwell-on-b...

That's...nuts. And amazing.

Good job SpaceX and NASA. Whenever I feel like the future is not that bright, I look at what is happening in the new American Space Race.

I'm calling it now. Within a year Crew Dragon is going to be landing the same way the Falcon is now.

That is most probably not going to happen. It was the original plan but it would have involved landing legs coming out of the heat shield which NASA was queasy about and would have involved quite a bit more effort to develop.

Crew dragon is (on the cusp of) delivering human launch to ISS capabilities back to NASA which was the core mission and a crucial objective for NASA so it wouldn't be dependent on Russian launch capabilities now so unsurprisingly inflated to outrageous prices since the shuttle was retired (not that the shuttle wasn't outrageously expensive either). Roscosmos had charmingly started charging 90mm per seat. Space X will charge 20 and will be capable of launching 7 astronauts vs 3 max capacity on Soyuz.

But Crew Dragon will have little to no part to play in the final objective of planetary colonisation so Space X doesn't care for it beyond that and is focusing full steam ahead on Starship.

Terrific mission though. Bravo Space X.

Yes. I think it's easy to understand most everything SpaceX does.

Musk wants humans to become an interplanetary species, full stop. Everything SpaceX does is in support of that.

Vast amounts of money and resources will be required for the final goal, likely more than SpaceX will ever have or control. So, in order to get others to spend big on the main goal, SpaceX needs to demonstrate realistic capabilities, such as bootstrapping a permanent settlement on Mars, though dependent on regular shipments from earth.

To accomplish that, SpaceX needs a lot of cash.

Crew Dragon is about the cash. Starlink is (mostly) about the cash.

I'm less certain about the following, but it might be accurate: Tesla is about the cash necessary to bootstrap a Mars settlement. If Tesla really goes big, Musk's shares will be worth many more billions than they are worth right now. I would not be surprised if, at some time in the future, he cashes out of Tesla and drops it all on SpaceX.

Exactly. Although I wouldn't personally think he built Tesla to potentially support Space X. He gave it the same 10% slim chance of success when he started as Space X, and he allocated to it roughly the same amount of funds ~ 100mm to each (for a total = to his entire net worth). So by going after Tesla as well he significantly hindered his chances of succeeding with Space X as that narrowed funds available for that project by half and if he had failed the fourth Falcon 1 launch it would have been game over for that. If all he cared for was Mars, it would have made a lot more sense for him to throw 200mm into Space X and greatly increase his chances of successfully developing an orbital vehicle and grow from there in partnership with NASA.

I think generally his core vision or at least core mission statement is to help humanity scale and survive and he'll allocate funds / explore opportunities however he seems best to achieve that.

One pillar of that vision is planetary colonisation to act as a hedge / diversification against a single planet extinction event. The other is making Earth life sustainable hence sustainably electrifying all forms of fossil fuel use cases the founding venture for that being Tesla.

All that said, I have a hard time at this point imagining Elon ever being resource constrained for his goals. He just has too many promising potential revenue lines. Hell, he could maybe fund all of it one day with a single asteroid capture for all we know.

His core constraint is time and he'll do whatever he can to speed things up. Crew Dragon was an important deliverable but ultimately obviously can't be expanded to serve the final vision and it makes sense to quickly move on with all the additional knowledge gained from the effort as a huge benefit.

Starship development should make the next few years just fascinating for us space nerds.

My guess is that he didn't start Tesla with the idea of using it as a (possible) cash cow for SpaceX. It was, as you said, to help humanity scale and survive.

What follows is definitely a bit more 'out there' than usual, and I don't hold strongly to it.

As Mr. Mush has gotten older, I suspect that his internal calculations related to the possibility of the collapse of human civilization have gone up enormously. Specifically, and he's said this multiple times, he thinks AI is the number one threat to human civilization, followed very closely by climate change. (Note: this isn't terminator style AI. It's software/hardware that is smarter than any human, or indeed all humans put together, but in the hands of very few people.)

My guess is that these have changed his perspective on the relative importance of SpaceX and Tesla in the greater scheme of things.

> Starship development should make the next few years just fascinating for us space nerds.

I am utterly pumped.

That's very possible. Although I'm not sure how he imagines escaping to another planet would be a solution for whatever threat AI specifically might pose. I'm pretty sure it would find a way to follow you through the solar system :)

Roscosmos should have been smart and required China to license back any improvements. Then they could have gotten a bigger and cheaper Soyuz with no development costs.

The only way propulsive landings might come back on dragon is if Red Dragon or Lunar Dragon missions happen.

That was the original plan, but NASA asked SpaceX to do splashdowns instead as it's viewed as a less risky landing method for a crewed vehicle.

Aren't splashdowns bad for re-usability? Doesn't all the saltwater do more damage than a falcon-style landing would do?

Yes, they are planning to refurbish and re-fly the splashed down crew Dragons as cargo dragons. But each crew Dragon will be new. I think Musk said it's almost as expensive to refurbish as build a new one (which is crazy to me but he'd know).

I figure it's less important to them for Mars etc, now that they plan to land the whole "second stage".

The second stage landing has been shelved, to work on Starship.

Starship is a second stage.

Sorry, I should clarify - the Falcon second-stage landing has been shelved. At this point Falcon is mostly a mature rocket, with (as I understand) the only continuing development being on the fairing recovery systems.

I assume they will pull off a few unscrewed cargo rocket decelerations before offering it as a crewed option.

That's my thinking. They have the regular Dragon to develop on first?

If by "regular Dragon" you mean Dragon 1, it doesn't have the SuperDraco thrusters necessary for vertical landing.

Seems like the whole mission was a 100% success?

Seems that way. The program director is on the stream right now saying "Everything happened perfectly, almost right down to the second".

It's pretty amazing watching this. I've been following this company since when I was in high school, before their first (failed) launch. However many years later, they're one step away from actually launching humans.

Can't wait to see them launch people later this year!

From the looks of it, it does. But don't forget the test dummy Riley is stuffed with sensors and those also need to show acceptable values.

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