NASA Astronauts in SpaceX Capsule Make First Water Landing Since 1975
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
On the plus side, my friend from Lockheed-Martin who bet me dinner at one's favorite restaurant that Boeing would be the first when the contract was announced, now owes me dinner, so there's that.
I had hoped see Starship hop 150m today[1] however that seems to have been scrubbed.
There is a really good lesson here for folks which is ignore the people saying you won't be able to do something and just execute. They can't argue with results.
EDIT: updated the link to point to the live camera pointed at the Starship SN5. Not sure what happened there. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QbM7Vsz3kg
I like this. Agree with your sentiment and as an armchair space fan, very excited to see the splash down. Can't help but feel inspired.
I read somewhere that Musk have managed to hire top of the cream engineers of America's aerospace contractors, and NASA for very small money, relatively speaking, after NASA got its original "new crewed mission" project cancelled.
And the irony is, that he got money for first SpaceX launches from NASA, and got a lot of engineering made for him for free at NASA as well.
Musk has hired pretty much the same people who were making the same rockets for LM, Boeing, and NASA.
Their experience surely contributed to their speed.
To me, they give a feeling that they have some very experienced, and conservative type managing their engineering who does everything by the book.
SpaceX has blown up a LOT of vehicles via mistakes, by iterating fast and learning from them. They use these as learning experiences, and if they can get a few satellites up in the interim, that's great (see: the starlink launches on re-used rockets). But when it comes to launching actual astronauts, they checked every one of NASA's million boxes.
NASA and Boeing are unfortunately incapable of operating in fast-and-loose mode, even when it would be better to iterate and break a few rockets. The two-mode operation is why SpaceX dominates, and likely will continue to crush.
Blue Origin for example managed to completely redo pretty much everything about their design few times over, while SpaceX had something resembling Falcon 1, and Falcon 9 on their drawing boards pretty much since the beginning.
Too much pivots, too much iterations, and close to no straight advancements.
Iteration is "improve the current model".
A restart throws the current model away.
I think this is pretty clearly not true.
"The book" says that once you have an operational configuration you freeze it. I remember hearing that the shuttle program was having to scrounge for old CPUs from warehouses because someone of the processors it used were no longer manufactured, and they didn't want to make changes to the hardware.
In contrast to this, SpaceX is famous for continuously modifying their rockets - so much so that one of the NASA requirements for certification was that they freeze the design of their F9.
Indeed they were literally buying Shuttle replacement parts from eBay: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/12/us/for-parts-nasa-boldly-...
I guess we've been reading different books then. The Shuttle you're referring to had been constantly modified and tuned (noise suppression to prevent STS-1-like body flap damage, autopilot, the anti-geyser line, LWT, SLWT etc etc etc). The other manned vehicle, Soyuz, is on its 8th major iteration already, and got many minor modifications in between.
They looked for old CPUs instead of upgrading because it wasn't worth it. Shuttle program got cancelled in 2004, and it was known well in advance that it will stop flying.
The difference is, they don't make headlines nearly as much. (Shuttle did early on, but it was too long ago)
There's no reason that other launch providers can't be doing what SpaceX is doing, but they aren't. They continue to design and build using more traditional and conservative aerospace management approaches.
Blue Origin is run by somebody with a background in finance and retail.
ULA by a former mechanical engineer.
Arianespace is run by a former policy guy turned exec.
Rocket Lab is run by an engineer.
Scaled Composites (I know a different kind of beast) is run by an aerospace engineer.
and so on.
We have embraced it strongly as an industry though. Except for the C++ people of course.
This is old stuff. They called it "skunkwork".
Or Soviet-like iterative methods.
While it's true that Blue Origin hasn't done anything more than a few test flights, they've definitely got a different view of the way to develop rockets.
Blue Origin effectively has no requirements to make a commercial return. Until Jeff Bezos runs out of cash (unlikely), gets bored (seemingly unlikely), or pissed off (who knows) they can keep going doing whatever they like. Certainly making money is an eventual goal, but it's not like a few delays or failures are going to result in them being unable to make rent.
For this reason, they've developed from the other end, first - perfecting their launch and landing with a smaller-scale rocket and iterating from that perspective.
SpaceX on the other hand is definitely marked by their early days where they were down to their last few $ and Elon being out of cash to keep running the business if it didn't work. So they've been working mostly on the "get something that customers will buy" side of things, with the addition of landing/re-use coming secondary.
But do they have any requirement to make a rocket? When will New Glenn fly?
Will they ever produce something that does something useful? I hope they do, we need competition in commercial space flight.
People want to make out SpaceX as if SpaceX is ideologically opposed to NASA or government funding and thus are hypocrites, when that has never been true. People like working at SpaceX because SpaceX gets stuff done and is developing truly transformative technology beyond the expendable paradigm of Apollo. Technology that will expand the availability of space to several orders of magnitude more people instead of just a handful of heroes. And NASA loves it.
I am not saying that
That isn't really "ironic" though. All of the technology that NASA develops is "free" for any US company that wants to use it. Pre-pandemic NASA would host an annual NASA Technology exposition at Ames Research that was kind of like a science fair for nerds. There were posters, and often the original investigators, who would discuss what they did, what they discovered, how it could be used, etc. A number of bio-diesel companies got their start from NASA bio-diesel research.
I much prefer that model to the one where the NSF or DARPA funds a university research program that then patents the research and holds it hostage to licensing fees.
The other aspect of your comment is also somewhat out of touch with the relationship NASA has with space craft. NASA has never been the sole supplier of a space craft. They always let contracts to vendors who built components of spacecraft and then they integrated those components into a complete system. Many of the "big" components for space craft are not off the shelf, like engines, so unless you want the government in the rocket engine building business, you buy those from someone else. From the very first, NASA rockets such as Vanguard and Mercury Redstone were purchased from others.
That said, NASA recognized as early as the Mercury project days that they were not ever going to be a "supplier" of rockets to third parties. They use rockets to do science and they need someone to buy them from.
One need only look at the Space Launch System (SLS) to see the travails of NASA trying to project manage building rockets these days. The budgeting process is stuffed to overflowing with politics where congressional representatives make budget dollars contingent on them going to a company in their district or state, and science as a priority comes and goes depending on the administration.
NASA didn't "give" SpaceX money, they bought rockets from SpaceX to meet their needs. Just like a startup that "lands" a big enterprise customer that buys their product and as a result provides the resources for the startup to both grow and build and deliver the product that was purchased.
Looking at the price they paid, they got a good deal. The first "big" contract, the resupply missions, cost NASA way less than it would have if they had paid ULA to launch those missions. At the same time SpaceX made enough profit from that contract to continue improving the fundamentals. Once it was clear they could reliably get things into orbit, other people who wanted to buy "launch services" started inquiring. SpaceX has out competed every other launch provider in the world because they can launch a payload and make money on it at a price that doesn't cover the other vendors launch at all. And they can do that because they are vertically integrated (pun intended) providing the booster, the engines, and the delivery system.
If you want to look at being "subsidized" by the government then you need look no further than the "cost plus" contracts that the government used to write for launch services. Those explicitly allowed the folks as ULA to scrape a few billion dollars off the top every year to "insure a domestic launch capability." Something you need if one third of your national defense rests on being able to use a rocket to put a bunch of nuclear warheads into someone's country[1].
So I think it is important to give credit where credit is due. Elon Musk re-imagined how the space launch industry might be structured and Gwen Shotwell effectively built a company that could execute on that re-imagining. This even when the existing companies in the space called Elon's ideas "fanciful", "ludicrous", or in one case "drug induced."
I continue to watch Blue Origin as well, although I feel as if the team of Jeff Bezos and Bob Smith (the CEO) is not as strong here. It is particularly illuminating to compare choices they have made as a company (secrecy vs openness, prioritizing sub-orbital over orbital, Etc.) and how they have played out.
[1] Hence the research programs of Iran, North Korea, India, and Pakistan to name a few.
NASA tries to make a new launcher by itself, though with big inputs from your usual defence industry contractors.
Gets shut down by politicians.
SpaceX waltzes into the room, hires all fired engineers working on that from NASA, and LM for a dime, has NASA do half of their rocket for them, for NASA's money (and thus US government's.)
Essentially Musk resold the exiting RnD, and work of US government's engineers to US government.
When NASA tried to create the Ares-1 they spend many, many billions and were basically nowwhere and the architecture of their vehicle was absolutly terrible and not remotely competitive with commercial rockets. The got 'shut down by politicians' is because it was a black money pit for a suppar rocket. The reason SpaceX 'waltzed in' was that they actually executed on price, so you don't really have an argument for shutting them down.
SpaceX doesn't just sell NASA RnD back to them. First of all, non of that RnD was anywhere near production level, and specially not at the prices SpaceX wanted offered. A lot of the NASA archtecture were simply fundamentally unusable or unpractical, specially if you wanted to use it in a commercial market.
In fact, one could argue that going againt everything NASA was doing at the time is what made SpaceX successful. SpaceX made its own choices on every part of the rocket and the capsule, systematically innovated on each part of the rocket and architecture ending up far away from what NASA would have ever even considered doing.
That NASA did in no why what so ever build half their rockets for them, or design them. I don't know where you came up with this.
What SpaceX is did is fundamentally innovate and rethink the problems to achieve a better solution both from a design and a manufacturing perspective. This downplaying of SpaceX achivement by claiming its all just NASA tech that they are selling to the government is just petty and sad.
Saying that they "resold their own RnD to them" is not copy-paste Ares-1.
ULA, Nasa, defence contractors at large had decades of experience with kerolox rocketry starting with first American rockets, which they threw away, and Musk picked up at the cheap with their engineers. And it was a very safe, and sound decision.
The same for returnable capsules, and orbital vehicle expertise.
And the Merlin now is a engine far beyond what any other US engine ever managed in a number of metrics.
Was it a bit easier to develop a kerlox engine for SpaceX in the US as compared to doing it in Bangladesh and starting fresh with every bit of technical knowlabe about Kerlox, of course it was but SpaceX went from a pretty simple starting point to an incredibly advanced rocket engine that they are flying now.
Putting the empasis on well somebody else has done a Kerlox engine before, rather then SpaceX designing and mass producing and incredibly advanced Kerlox engine is just downplaying what they achieved.
What Musk/SpaceX do is a tiny bit different - they're taking politics out of the equation, because unlike ULA they have a boatload of private customers willing to launch satellites for cheap and not have a major problem if one or two launches go bust. If NASA/ULA manage to fuck up a mission there will be political consequences.
Not to mention that SpaceX is staff lean which means they have the freedom to do whatever they want to keep costs low, while NASA/ULA is under Congressional pressure to dole out money across the country, even if this is completely against efficiency (and for what it's worth the ESA/Ariane/EADS/Airbus complex suffers from the same problem).
>NASA tries to make a new launcher by itself, though with big inputs from your usual defence industry contractors.
The way NASA works is as follows; First, they put together a program proposal. Like they put together the Mars Exploration Program[1] in response to their 2014 Science Plan[2]. The program is allocated budget from NASAs annual budget allocation from congress.
Then they create science missions which are specific projects within a program that support the program goals. The current Mars mission, Perseverance, is an example.
Then they go out and contract with vendors for hardware that they can use in the mission. That includes everything from rovers to launch services.
In the case of Artemis, NASA created a program to return a person to the moon. And they started creating requirements for the equipment that they would need. And they put out those contracts and request proposals, which capable vendors will send in. Then they select from the proposals they get and issue a contract. The vendor then builds the part to the requirements, NASA verifies that it meets there needs, and then they pay the vendor. Often these contracts will have several milestones that have to be met, and the vendor will be paid for meeting milestones. This lets the vendor get some money to buy raw materials and start construction, etc.
Cost overruns occur when the vendor discovers something between milestones that wasn't anticipated and they negotiate with NASA for additional funds to cover that need.
NASA has never "tried to make a new launcher", that they have done is specified requirements for a launcher that doesn't yet exist and asked people to send them proposals for how they would build it.
[2] http://smd-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/science-pink/s3fs-public/at...
[1] https://www.winnebago.com/models/product/motorhomes/class-a/...
― Bernard Shaw
Yes. Can we cancel the NASA Space Launch System now?
It is, of course, very reasonable to wait for Starship to actually launch and demonstrate a couple flights. But I would be very very surprised if SLS still exists in two years.
IMO, NASA/Congress will hang on to SLS for as long as it is remotely defensible.
The US will need 2 heavy lift, large diameter rockets before SLS gets the axe. Once Starship and New Glenn are flying it'll be significantly more difficult to justify the $2 billion / year spent just on the SLS program (not counting the actual rockets, which are another $1 billion a pop).
I didn't see where you had mentioned a negative side here. I can't think of one. And congrats on the dinner!
That's cool that spaceX is doing it, but I miss how this is such a big event?
It is impressive that a company, not a country now also has that capability.
Put another way, for the last 10 years if a US Person wanted to go up to the ISS they would have to buy a ticket on a Russian Soyuz, now they have a choice.
This is a RESCUE operation and they're getting in the way.
Not to mention, there's still plenty of extremely poisonous UDMH on that thing.
They made a choice, and I really hope there are consequences for their decision.
Seems like a good thing to me, obviously not $STUPID_THING_SOMEONE_DID, but the openness.
I downvoted you; this kind of brash generalization about people because of their regional locality shouldn't be encouraged. It's expressing a silly and un-true meme as if it were the reality for all people living in Florida.
You aren't the only one in this thread to do so, either. I hope in the future that anyone , anywhere in the world, will double think when they say "X is from Y, they must be Z", because it's never true for the herd.
If they have to get involved, IMO, they should send SpaceX the bill.
Most of the time, letting your kids play in a Superfund site won’t lead to a bad outcome. That doesn’t make it sensible.
Hydrazine didn’t leak this time. That’s good. But it’s a stupid dice to roll.
It's a fixed cost contract, while SpaceX might push back on accepting the bill in the first place, they are unlikely to be able to redirect it to NASA if they choose to accept the bill.
Of course, I would expect to see this cost reflected in all future contracts they and anyone else signs with NASA.
Government agencies can only impose fees and charges on private entities where those are authorised (directly or indirectly) by legislation. And agencies have far greater discretion to make contracts in which they are the customer than those in which they are the vendor. The later kind of contracts generally need approval at a far more senior level than the former (in some cases even requiring approval by the legislature).
2) Bragging rights.
They probably have to make it as small as possible to minimize disruption to the public.
The right solution is probably to just have more Coast Guard on hand.
If I recall right the SR-71 used similar propellants to get the afterburners lit which made fueling... interesting.
Hypergolic indicates when when two propellants (a fuel and an oxidizer) come in contact with each other, they ignite spontaneously.
Pyrophoric indicates that the fuel ignites when it contacts air (no oxidizer needed in a normal Earth atmosphere).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergolic_propellant#Common
I expect they'll have more than one Coast Guard vessel on hand next time, and will probably look into not publicizing the landing zone.
I think you're right about there being some CG vessels around for the next landing.
But even if it's not technically secret there's a big difference between a NOTAM and putting out press releases with specific locations, which they did this time.
It is _extremely_ aggravating.
To think that random people would have so little self awareness is mindboggling.
I can totally understand that people want to see this. People also come to see launches, so why not this? But really, from a safe distance. Make sure you don't interfere in any way with the operation, and listen to instructions.
It seems one of the lessons is that if they continue to do splashdowns here, they need better spectator control.
Close enough that they had to be asked to back off after having already ignored Coast Guard requests.
————
As the capsule bobbed in the water, a recovery team instructed the boaters to stay away.
The Coast Guard warned boaters to stay clear of the area in a radio broadcast two hours before the splashdown, said the spokesman, Petty Officer Third Class John Michelli. “With limited assets available and with no formal authority to establish zones that would stop boaters from entering the area,” he said, “numerous boaters ignored the Coast Guard crews’ requests and decided to encroach the area, putting themselves and those involved in the operation in potential danger.”
If it is live, go back to roughly 2:45 EST. If it is no longer live, it should be around 7h15m in the VOD.
(I really wish you could link to a time on a livestream, or even better, create a "Clip" like with Twitch.)
EDIT: Well it is streamed on Twitch so here's a clip: https://www.twitch.tv/nasa/clip/CourteousPatientVelociraptor...
From which you can also click "watch full video" which puts you at the exact right time in the full VOD.
Congrats, I'm looking forward to the next steps. And I am so sorry american citizenship is required to apply for SpaceX jobs :-(
Making it look mundane seems like a conscious choice.
Interestingly ITAR rules themselves only specify "US persons" (which includes LPRs, certain refugees/asylees), not necessarily exclusively citizens. It seems that restricting hiring to citizens in order to comply with ITAR may actually contradict the law:
https://www.wiggin.com/publication/hiring-u-s-citizens-only-...
https://www.justice.gov/crt/page/file/1080256/download
It's possible that certain SpaceX positions have additional clearance requirements that may require citizenship. However a random search on SpaceX's hiring site only specifies ITAR requirements, and it describes the "US persons" category correctly.
https://boards.greenhouse.io/spacex/jobs/4750171002?gh_jid=4...
You don’t quite get the historical significance of what you are working on until you get to see it in context.
I’ll always look back at my work at SpaceX as one of the highlights of my journey through engineering. Among other things, it is because of this that we are now working on a project for NASA’s Artemis mission and will likely deliver hardware to the moon starting next year and possibly every year until 2026 or thereabouts.
Of course this is just an analogy. We can study functional differences - while both Vostok and Crew Dragon can deliver a human to orbit and back, they differ a lot regarding how well they do that and what they can also do, in addition to the main functionality.
I'd argue Apollo, as spacecraft, is left behind. Far behind, and the scale of today's works is way bigger. You can't compare Sno-Buggy - a towering automotive achievement of its time - with modern Toyotas in numbers, development resources spent, functional richness, versatility of uses.
Apollo was different because it flew away from a low Earth orbit - a first for manned spacecrafts. And Starship maybe will fly even farther - qualitatively - than Apollo - in this sense it's a big step, yes. But making what was nearly impossible 60 years ago routine and affordable isn't unimportant or cheap.
That's why Starship is the most important step. It's like Apollo in scale of the launch, but will be launched much more often. And the vehicle itself can be refueled, which means you can send ~100 people to the surface of the Moon and back instead of just 2-3... And perhaps can send people all the way to Mars. And for maybe a tenth the price of a Dragon run to LEO.
THAT is transformative. Orders of magnitude more ambitious while being an order of magnitude cheaper per mission. Dragon is still just incremental, although probably a necessary step along that road.
We may argue about what is transformative - first orbital flight, first flight above LEO, first lunar landing and first hand-off of expedition on a space station all are.
From question "do we have progress?" we switched to "do we have big step up or not?". And if you look at achievement during 1960-s, all subsequent steps were incremental over previous, from technological point of view. Yet people managed to do something which wasn't done before - and to have a period in time, roughly 1960-s, when, if you compare what you had before that period and after, you have accumulated achievements which seem like a lot.
Yes it's a lot. Yes it was built on top of what was possible by then - with a lot of efforts during 1960-s. Yes we plan to have similar situations soon :) . However - even though we don't have Starship yet, and no matter if Crew Dragon is needed for that (it is), we still have progress right now.
Only instead comparing years 1960 and 1970, you have to compare 2005 and 2020. Shenzhou was a refined descendant of Soyuz, with corresponding limitations learned later, while Crew Dragon is a clean sheet implementation of what we know about capsule flight, a complex dance of engineering and economy. Discounting it as an insufficiently ambitious is a little like dismissing ITER just because it's not going to support itself economically, so can't be economically scaled.
In other words, I'm not talking about Starship here, focusing on Crew Dragon.
Edit: Oh, there was another boat the parent comment was referring to.
Fellow sailor crossed the course of Turkish submarine while under sail (meaning he had a right of passage). It was in Turkey's waters (!) about 10 years ago. Instead of changing course they made an emergency dive exercise.
It’s gotta be fun to have three dimensions of freedom available when making course changes.
But man, I’d freak out if I were on the sailboat watching that happen!
That said, international waters isn't actually a lawless zone. These boats are undoubtedly registered in the US, and thus subject to US law.
It's hardly uncommon for cops to tell people to back up from an accident/crime scene if they're too close.
I hate to talk against here because she is awesome. But this social trick where everytime SpaceX does anything, the Anti-Elon crowed have to truck out the 'actually its all the enlighted levelheaded female president' not the 'nasty meme-obscessed man child asshole' is actually responsable for all the success argument, its so fucking tiered and inaccurate.
You didn't go there fully but the amount of people who argue that SpaceX achieves what it does despite Elon is just stagering. People seem to believe any bullshit if it confirms their bias.
Again, I love Gwynne she is great and so are others who work at SpaceX now or have done in the past. They achieve what they do as a team, at the same time its no question who leads the team, who makes the most important choices, who owns and controls the company.
There's no doubt that Elon is gifted from the engineering and vision side. But Gwynne is the one that actually (paraphrasing her words) turns his seemingly crazy vision into an actual project with milestones and how to get there. I think they complement each other really well.
You can see how much of a mess Tesla is, without having someone like that to complement Elon's skills. SpaceX (also because of the domain) seems like it is run by a grownup.
Tesla on the other hand seems like it's run by a bunch of people who excel at the tough engineering challenges (contrast the cars themselves with the service experience), but have less interest in the easier stuff (running a well stocked service center). Look at the way they confusingly change pricing so often.
Tesla needs an Elon Musk but they badly need a Gwynne Shotwell.
It's been 2 years since Jérôme Guillen has become Tesla's President of Automotive. You wouldn't know.
Based on what objective metric?
Let me be clear. I own a Model 3, and I love it. I also own Tesla stock. And I cheer when their sales go up.
My criticism is from wanting them to be better. They've got all the really difficult stuff right (the car is amazing, comfortable, and we all love it). It's the easy stuff that's "boring grown up stuff of running a business" where they need a lot of help.
SpaceX has that and they have Gwynne. So do pretty much all other car manufactures, specifically with electric cars.
Having great service while scaling is insanely difficult. Just having some other influentual manager is not gone magically solve that incredibly difficult problem.
Overall the company has been anything but messy, rather they have been executing pretty well, better then most people expected.
I don’t know what people expected but I expect them to miss deadlines with the harder stuff where they’re trailblazers (like autopilot).
But building a reliable car is largely a solved problem. Even Elon has admitted they over engineered the manufacturing before they had to just use more people.
They continue to innovate and have been strategically investing in becoming a battery provider and building and expanding factories in all the important markets.
And building EV at good margin is defiantly not a solved problem.
With all of the real problems occurring on Earth today, I cannot help but feel this is just ego-driven madness. The time, resources, and energy being poured into such projects could have been spent building a better world for us today--with results that we could (and would) see in our lifetimes.
Instead, are we merely spread humanity across the galaxy in centuries to come--if at all? For what purpose?
But SpaceX gives me hope that we can actually do "big things" again. On the contrary, with all the other problems on Earth, this launch gives me more hope that we can tackle some of those problems. I mean, it's not like the resources that go into launching space ships would just shift into, I don't know, school lunches or something.
I think this is especially relevant to the HN crowd, where a common lament that all the technical wizardry of silicon valley got us over the past 20+ years was smartphones and facebook, but not real "hard" problems. Feels inspiring to see there are companies out there that can really address things that really are rocket science.
I love space and spaceships. I wish I could work in that industry and would jump at the chance.
> With all of the real problems occurring on Earth today, I cannot help but feel this is just ego-driven madness.
Yes indeed. But, ego-driven madness generates a lot of useful utility. I'd say the worst part is the pollution of satellites for ground-based space observation. Despite that, I fully think that mankind should expand into space and become a spacefaring race in spite of all of the risks. And I think, for compensation, publicly accessible orbital observatories should become a thing. Unfortunately, at the current price tag of orbit, that might take a while.
> Instead, are we merely spread humanity across the galaxy in centuries to come--if at all? For what purpose?
For whatever purpose we want. The only unfortunate thing is that only the rich can afford to guide us at the moment. I look forward to the day that anyone can own a spaceship as anyone can own a car.
There's a lot of spaceship science fiction movies and TV series to draw inspiration from. I get the impression that you're either too young to have seen a lot of it or, perhaps, it hasn't been a passion of yours. What drives you to to be who you are?
Chances are good that, even if you want to just be a simple farmer, you use and rely on "space age" technology. Who knows what cool and/or useful stuff could be brought by the future of space tech? In-orbit manufacturing of exotic materials for safety, for communication; in-orbit energy collection and generation. I'm excited for the prospect of orbital farming for food -- a completely controlled environment away from pests? Oh man that's going to be game changing!
They forgot to add "For our frequent flyer program members, your mileage accounts will be updated in next 24 to 48 hours"
Also: "Seats are spacious, entertainment system is top notch, big screens, good internet connection except during descent. After landing they didn't open the exit for half an hour. Good food. Overall 4/5, would recommend".
Autocorrect typo. Fixed. Thank you.
Would they have to dig 100 miles in a day or something to show the world something as impressive? Thoughts?
If that was real, how? (340 m/s)
If the sound wasn’t real, what was it?
I heard it as well.
I still can't believe the moon landing was only fifty years ago.
Gemini 7 might just be the least pleasant space mission. Two astronauts spent 14 days in their cramped capsule. One of them had to wait six days before being allowed to take the spacesuit off, but the capsule was uncomfortably hot anyway. There was no toilet, and the urine collector was leaky. Reading about that mission has been eye-opening to how unglamorous spaceflight gets, and left me even more amazed at how well-trained and professional the astronauts are, being able to complete such an unpleasant mission without incident.
https://twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/1290001444968505344/ph...
So lots of obvious problems and probably a few more that are less obvious.
However I’m not sure what you mean by inefficient here. Parachutes work great on Earth for vehicles of a certain size.
Second:
I'm a bit disturbed that they are using Chromium + some javascript framework as the UI layer in the Crew Dragon.
There was a sequence when Bob and Doug were debugging the local UI layer. I guess it was a good thing that didn't happen at a critical part of the flight.
Edit: And I write this having spent 10 years working in a browser company in an engineering/engineering management role. I believe I have a decent understanding of the risks.
Going with a browser-based UI for something as critical as this is insane, IMHO.
I got the play-by-play from https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/hzbqwn/rspacex_demo... when I was waking up (european time) but it seems like you can't really view all of the comments of a 3000+ comment thread. :(
Hopefully someone who payed attention for real can chime in.
A funny moment was when ground control asked the astronauts to turn off wifi and switch to the Airplane mode. Shouldn't it be renamed to Spaceship mode? :)
https://youtu.be/13OkD0C_TWU?t=15045
Note they are talking about Safari and Airplane Mode, and when the Dragon feed comes back up you can see the iPad in the astronaut’s hand.
I get to eat crow now. :)
Still: I'm kinda skeptical of the use of chromium + javascript for anything life-critical.
> There was a sequence when Bob and Doug were debugging the local UI layer. I guess it was a good thing that didn't happen at a critical part of the flight.
No that didn't happen. They had an issue with an ipad they use for displaying a schedule.
> It's a modified Chromium + javascript, but it's only for visual presentation, all the software for actually reading and acting on that data isn't in javascript.
So, chromium + js for the UI, and c++ for the web server backend, right? You're still depending on an insanely large piece of code (chromium) and javascript for actually showing the data, and collecting the input events.