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Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

Soyuz recently developed a 3 hour flight profile to ISS, instead of a 27 hour one. Maybe they'll revise the Dragon profile sometime.

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2020/10/soyuz-ms17-ultrafast...

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Scott Manley posted a great video a few weeks ago explaining the differences between the ways SpaceX and Soyuz do their orbital insertion and rendez-vous with the ISS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUi0yWc5Dnw

It's a bit incorrect -- Soyuz is using Russian-made rendezvous system Kurs-NA since 2016. Ukrainian-made Kurs system is obsolete.

My understanding is that if they had launched yesterday as originally planned it would’ve taken only 8 hours to get to ISS.

This was just answered in the coast phase broadcast:

Including a break for sleep is also a large factor in this profile given the time of day of today's launch.

I can't imagine sleeping under these circumstances. I'd probably be pumped so full of adrenaline, I wouldn't be able to sleep for a week.

Ambien. Members of SEAL team 6 actually napped on the helicopter ride to take out Bin Laden: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/09/ho...

Humans are amazing in our ability to adapt to the new normal. I was of the same mind of how the heck could you do this, however my body learned when I was in the military to sleep whenever it could under circumstances that I would have never consider possible until it became the new normal. Years latter I had the pleasure of teaching my wife to sky dive. On the ride up to altitude I would close my eyes and nap she was a bundle of nervous energy. She said it freaked her out, I just smiled. The average humans ability to adapt is key to our success as a species. In the end, I did nothing special, I just adapted to survive.

That would depend on whether the Falcon 9 has enough delta-V to do a plane change maneuver like the Soyuz does. Otherwise, launch windows would be months apart.

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