Crew Dragon Docks with ISS

And think of the fact that all of this is nothing compared to what a fully-deployed StarLink will do, and what weekly or daily launch capabilities would mean for the U.S. armed forces. The number of satellites to shoot down in a war is going up, and the rate at which they can be replaced is also going up. Moreover, the cost of sending up new interesting military sats is going way down, which means we'll see greatly upgraded capabilities in many areas. Civilian science too will be benefiting greatly.

SpaceX's commercial and non-commercial competition is hobbled by subsidies. Ahhh, what a great demonstration that subsidies are dangerous to business. Otherwise, if they really wanted to, the competition is not that far behind SpaceX, and could catch up, and pretty quickly if they want to, but in the meantime, SpaceX continues to innovate and get ahead.

I believe this is backwards, SpaceX was created first and it was implied in the biography that it's more as if Tesla was the side project.

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 beholden to a single planet.

Lots of challenges still to come, but this is a reminder that those challenges can someday be overcome.

SpaceX was founded in 2002, almost two decades ago

Now, before everyone goes huffy on me, I’m not trying to disregard everything that SpaceX has accomplished.

Also Tesla seems to be extremely focused on r&d.

How does Elon Musk push and run his organisations so differently that he seems to be one of the only few, if not only one, capable of running big organisations that are able to accomplish this extreme level of innovation paired with tangible results?

Capacity to put mass into low orbit, but building a multipart space station requires far more than cobbling modules together KSP-style. Shuttle and the Canadarm(s) built the space station. SpaceX doesn't have that construction/manipulation capacity. It doesn't have the spacewalk capacity. To match Shuttle and build another ISS SpaceX would need to send people and cargo on the same flight, something that is certainly physically possible but remains logistically complex. NASA doesn't spend millions training astronauts in that giant swimming pool because they like the water.

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.

“There were times when I thought he was off his rocker,” Mueller confesses. “When I first met him, he said, ‘How much do you think we can get the cost of an engine down, compared to what you were predicting they’d cost at TRW?’ I said, ‘Oh, probably a factor of three.’ He said, ‘We need a factor of 10.’ I thought, ‘That’s kind of crazy.’ But in the end, we’re closer to his number!

https://www.airspacemag.com/space/is-spacex-changing-the-roc...

This is in response to the engine. Maybe they got the engine price 10x cheaper, but the other components not so much?

Eventually I expect used ones to be not only cheaper, but also more reliable. Like for (water)ships - they say “it’s new after you’ve owned it for a year”, the implication being that you spend the first year discovering and fixing manufacturing defects.

What NASA pays doesn’t necessarily reflect the cost since we do not know the margins.

However, I do agree that it’s valuable to be skeptical of unproven claims regarding cost reduction, though most of what we say is that we do not know much about the current real cost.

There's a massive margin on that price, which allows them to fund their other developments such as the Starlink and Starship.

Whatever the values, what are interesting are the magnitudes.

SpaceX could have very nice margins.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/

What got me, was that the whole boarding process was held up for over 30 minutes, because NASA couldn't progress past their 'hard wire' item on their checklist.

They eventually switched to RF (radio) direct link between the ISS and Dragon to be able to progress past that checklist item - later on the hard wire audio was fixed and working.

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.

And whats up with the guy with baseball bat while taking photo? Is that normal?

The sun has almost exactly the same apparent angular size from either Earth's surface or LEO, because it's almost exactly the same distance away. But since that angular size is only about half a degree, shadows observed at short distances appear fairly sharp, either on Earth or in space.

What you may be thinking of is that, in many cases, shadows are darker in space, because the sky is dark, even in broad daylight. There's no atmospheric scattering to provide indirect, ambient illumination of regions that are shaded from direct sunlight. But there can still be indirect lighting from other surfaces.

For example, in photos of Apollo astronauts on the moon, shaded regions of the astronauts' spacesuits are still fairly-well illuminated by light bouncing off the lunar surface. But shadowed regions of the surface itself appear almost pitch-black, because the only thing they can "see" is the dark sky.

If you mean the contrast between lit and shadowed areas, LEO is quite different from e.g. the moon, as even though it's out of the atmosphere, there's a lot of ambient light from the huge close Earth below.

That's because the sun is almost a 'point' light source because it's far away, and Earth is 'area' light source because it's close by. Also it depends how far the shadow source is from the shadow target.

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.

You've been in the teamwork game a long time, right? You know that each new team member added to a team does something like double or quadruple communication overhead. They're trying to work out the kinks - they're going to with a small team of experienced people to stay focused.

There's probably also a limit to how many people they want to keep track of on ISS, like you said. It's also less risky like you said - you need two people in case one gets incapacitated, and also for psychological support, but you don't want to risk any more people on the maiden voyage than you have to.

>Compared to Soyuz [4], which cost NASA $80m/astronaut, that's a saving but not as much as I would've thought.

There's more to it than costs. We now have the agency to launch as many astronauts as we want, when we want, rather than filling in a vacant seat the Russians have. Something not considered in just costs is we can also charge other nations for rides on our rockets, and as long as it's less than $80m, we'll make profits and it'll be a win for those nations who'd normally ride on Soyuz.

The legacy he leaves will be greater than that of Ghengis Kahn, Ceasar, or Alexander the Great.

Second reason is this is the first time the spacecraft has been built and run by a commercial company (spacex)