16 ms·

NASA, SpaceX set May 27 as target date for first crew launch

304 points by whiskers 7y ago

BiasRegularizer 7y ago
Another loss for Boeing on top of the 737MAX debacle and Covid-19. I would hate to be their CEO right now.
- tw04 7y ago
  Why? He's head of a company that is too big to fail. A company that the federal government has refused to demand a stake in, in order to bail out. No matter what he does, he's going to make $10s of millions of dollars. I would LOVE to be CEO of Boeing right now. And oh, by the way: since he started in Janaury, he can blame literally everything on the previous leadership. Probably one of the most cake jobs in America right now.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    If he wants to run the company into the ground it is a cake job. If he wants to recover the company to the glory days of making things that capture the imagination of the world he has a hard job. The salary of a CEO would be nice but I wouldn't want the jobs. CEOs tend to be workaholics with a poor family life. Even the bad ones spend a lot of time working.
  - zpeti 7y ago
    You may be right, because there are rare cases, but I find it unlikely. Not many human beings go into life aiming to just rip people off and not achieve anything, or aiming to fail at a lot. Especially someone who becomes the CEO of a huge corporation. You have to be quite drive to succeed, not just at your bank balance, to get there. You don’t become CEO of boeing overnight, it probably took a lot of work. I doubt the CEO feels all that good about life right now. And even if you are right, that fact that you’d want the same says a lot about you.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
    Correction, he can blame most things on the previous leadership. He can blame everything else on the coronavirus.
- swarnie_ 7y ago
  Agreed, i'd rather be the last CEO that caused all of this and still got a golden handjob worth 60 mil.
- hughes 7y ago
  Their stock is up 12% today.
dgritsko 7y ago
This is incredibly exciting. Watching SpaceX over the last few years has made me feel like a kid again (watching the livestream of the first Falcon Heavy launch, culminating with footage of Elon's Tesla in orbit, is a memory I won't soon forget). I wish them nothing but continued success, they are an inspiration to many.
- soperj 7y ago
  The landing was way more exciting than the car in space in my opinion.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    Agreed. Getting payloads to interplanetary orbit is a decades-old trick now---still tricky, but we've become exceedingly good at it. Having the machine that does that work realign with the angular velocity of the surface of Earth under its own power in any way other than "catastrophic disintegration" is arguably the harder task, and this new method of doing it is still very novel.
  - alpaca128 7y ago
    Definitely. Both thrusters landing simultaneously was incredible. They truly made a part of scifi reality with that milestone. The Tesla in space was cool but in the end it wasn't more of an accomplishment than placing any other satellite out there.
    - s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
      It's a pretty cool orbit though: https://www.whereisroadster.com/ https://www.whereisroadster.com/
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      SpaceX recently released new 4k footage of the first stage returns to the landing zones: https://youtu.be/fbbSCqaeWyA https://youtu.be/fbbSCqaeWyA
- 7y ago
ColanR 7y ago
If there was ever a crucial moment for Boeing to play dirty, this would be it. I can imagine that a single failure of this crewed rocket flight would just about end SpaceX's relationship with NASA.
- ecpottinger 7y ago
  Which would mean SpaceX will just go it alone. It really would look bad for NASA if SpaceX then does manned missions that NASA can't do. NASA can not count on the SLS to do the job, if only because it costs do much to launch the SLS that NASA can not afford many missions with it.
  - nikofeyn 7y ago
    > It really would look bad for NASA if SpaceX then does manned missions that NASA can't do. that's been the case for almost a decade now. just replace spacex with the soyuz rocket.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  Doubt it. Boeing and other companies are filled with people who just want spaceflight to succeed.
- aguyfromnb 7y ago
  >If there was ever a crucial moment for Boeing to play dirty, this would be it. Yeah, Boeing is going to sabotage this launch, just like Big Oil, Big Auto, Big Media and Big ShortSeller sabotage Tesla. These companies have a delusional fanbase.
  - Rebelgecko 7y ago
    Don't forget about Tory Bruno's sniper
- bluGill 7y ago
  While possible I doupt they will. You sabotage your competitors in congress if you can. However operations like this should be allowed and even cheered. The worst case now for Boeing is a series of disasters that leaves the public unwilling to fund anymore space thus killing not only SpaceX, but also Boeing. If Boeing sabotages SpaceX not only do they risk that they also risk getting caught by the investigation which would be bad for Boeing. Note that unsuccessful sabotage meaning you are caught is a real risk as well.
nickik 7y ago
> American astronauts on American rockets from American soil Jim Bridenstine Jim Bridenstine really knows how to talk politics. I must say I very impressed with his tenure so far, the NASA Administrator is not really all that powerful of a position but given how much opposition there was to him being a Trump selection he does do well. This is such a vital step to make LEO a commercial domain. NASA is spending way to much money on LEO and to make any moon/mars future possible that needs to be commercial. NASA only want to launch max. 4 people per ship, but it can take 7. So the price could really be cheap pretty cheap to allow a fair amount of non-NASA groups to send up people. Axiom Space got the contract extending the ISS and a more commercial ISS could operate more efficiently in the longer run. Eventually, with the cost of Cargo Space transportation coming down, we could actually build Space Stations in Space and make them way bigger.
- yingw787 7y ago
  I think NASA is usually a politically safe place to be. Airplane crashes are unpopular and media-friendly. Rocket explosions or shuttle crashes (esp. with people on them) often result in an Oval Office address. Nobody wants to be on the short end of that stick. Funding is spread out across the U.S. esp. Texas and Florida to ensure broad political support (or at least apathy), and scientists and engineers don't make too much fuss. It's like the military's baby brother. For a long time, I was cynical about even the principle of going to space before we solved problems down here, but now I'm more stoic and appreciative. It's a tangible, tractable hope that gets people out of bed in the morning, and consciously keeping that candle lit is the very best of being human.
  - jedberg 7y ago
    > Funding is spread out across the U.S. esp. Texas and Florida to ensure broad political support Heh, maybe now. But when NASA was created, the reason Texas was involved at all was because Senator Johnson (future President Johnson) was the head of the committee that pushed the bill to create NASA. Technically it made no sense for mission control and training to be in Texas. It would be far more efficient in Florida. Florida was chosen because it is the best spot to launch rockets in the US from a physics perspective (closer to the equator is better) that still had easy access from the rest of the US (which is why Hawaii was ruled out even though it would be technically better). But yes, as a side effect of the political posturing to get NASA funded, it ended up spreading the money around the country nicely.
skunkworker 7y ago
It looks like SpaceX will gain the pride of having the 8 by 12 inch American flag left by the last shuttle mission. "The shuttle replica accompanied an expected presentation of a U.S. flag that was flown on the first and last shuttle missions. The 8- by 12-inch flag, which was revealed by President Barack Obama during his call to the astronauts last week, will stay on board the station until the shuttle's successor arrives. "This flag represents not just a symbol of our national pride and honor, but in this particular case, it represents a goal," Ferguson said. "This flag will be flown prominently here by the forward hatch of Node 2, to be returned to Earth once again by an astronaut that launches on a U.S. vehicle, hopefully in just a few years." [9 Weird Things That Flew On NASA's Shuttles] Both the model and flag were hung near and on the hatch where 35 space shuttle crews have entered the station and where the STS-135 astronauts exited for a final time soon after presenting the mementos." https://www.space.com/12335-shuttle-astronauts-flag-model-space-station-tribute.html https://www.space.com/12335-shuttle-astronauts-flag-model-sp...
- corywright 7y ago
  Doug Hurley was the pilot on the shuttle crew that left the flag on the ISS, and will be the commander of the crew that brings it back to Earth.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    There are several very large assumptions implicit in that sentence.
    - gputhrowaway630 7y ago
      Hurley is going to be the "Spacecraft Commander" as mentioned in the article. The parent comment also indicates that they will be bringing the flag/memorial/token back. I'm not sure what "large implicit assumptions" you are referring too.
      - jacquesm 7y ago
        - mission not being scrubbed for a variety of possible reasons - mission commander not being changed - rocket not blowing up on the pad - rocket reaching correct orbit - mission not being completed, for instance docking issues - everything that could possibly go wrong on the return flight Really, the ease with which everybody seems to assume that this will go off without a hitch is impressive, this is not exactly walking to the corner store to pick up a small parcel.
croh 7y ago
Isn't it the stupidest thing to do in current situation ? Endangering lives of crews, operations and families.
- greedo 7y ago
  I think NASA and SpaceX can quarantine a crew safely, and can manage the operations.
  - Symmetry 7y ago
    They've been quarantining astronauts before launch ever since that incident in the Gemini program.
- vermontdevil 7y ago
  We just launched three astronauts last week. They have quarantine process they've been using for years even before COVID-19 came up.
  - cm2187 7y ago
    First I am not aware that these three astronauts are the only people required to launch that rocket. And it feels very much like "do as I say not as I do" from the government. How is it an essential activity?
    - m4rtink 7y ago
      Essential as in the first and so far only permanent manned orbital station with countless research projects ongoing & likely tens of thousand of people supporting the project directly and indirectly by their jobs ? ISS is not really designed to operate unmanned for any length of time & you could easily loose it due to some simple failure that the crew on board can easily address.
      - cm2187 7y ago
        Well, tell that to the hundreds of thousands of small businesses that are going out of business, that your toy up there is more important than their livelihood.
mrfusion 7y ago
It’s a shame no one will be allowed to watch it :-(

304 points by whiskers 7y ago

BiasRegularizer 7y ago

Another loss for Boeing on top of the 737MAX debacle and Covid-19. I would hate to be their CEO right now.

tw04 7y ago
Why? He's head of a company that is too big to fail. A company that the federal government has refused to demand a stake in, in order to bail out. No matter what he does, he's going to make $10s of millions of dollars. I would LOVE to be CEO of Boeing right now. And oh, by the way: since he started in Janaury, he can blame literally everything on the previous leadership. Probably one of the most cake jobs in America right now.
- bluGill 7y ago
  If he wants to run the company into the ground it is a cake job. If he wants to recover the company to the glory days of making things that capture the imagination of the world he has a hard job. The salary of a CEO would be nice but I wouldn't want the jobs. CEOs tend to be workaholics with a poor family life. Even the bad ones spend a lot of time working.
- zpeti 7y ago
  You may be right, because there are rare cases, but I find it unlikely. Not many human beings go into life aiming to just rip people off and not achieve anything, or aiming to fail at a lot. Especially someone who becomes the CEO of a huge corporation. You have to be quite drive to succeed, not just at your bank balance, to get there. You don’t become CEO of boeing overnight, it probably took a lot of work. I doubt the CEO feels all that good about life right now. And even if you are right, that fact that you’d want the same says a lot about you.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  Correction, he can blame most things on the previous leadership. He can blame everything else on the coronavirus.
swarnie_ 7y ago
Agreed, i'd rather be the last CEO that caused all of this and still got a golden handjob worth 60 mil.
hughes 7y ago
Their stock is up 12% today.

dgritsko 7y ago

This is incredibly exciting. Watching SpaceX over the last few years has made me feel like a kid again (watching the livestream of the first Falcon Heavy launch, culminating with footage of Elon's Tesla in orbit, is a memory I won't soon forget). I wish them nothing but continued success, they are an inspiration to many.

soperj 7y ago
The landing was way more exciting than the car in space in my opinion.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  Agreed. Getting payloads to interplanetary orbit is a decades-old trick now---still tricky, but we've become exceedingly good at it. Having the machine that does that work realign with the angular velocity of the surface of Earth under its own power in any way other than "catastrophic disintegration" is arguably the harder task, and this new method of doing it is still very novel.
- alpaca128 7y ago
  Definitely. Both thrusters landing simultaneously was incredible. They truly made a part of scifi reality with that milestone. The Tesla in space was cool but in the end it wasn't more of an accomplishment than placing any other satellite out there.
  - s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
    It's a pretty cool orbit though: https://www.whereisroadster.com/ https://www.whereisroadster.com/
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    SpaceX recently released new 4k footage of the first stage returns to the landing zones: https://youtu.be/fbbSCqaeWyA https://youtu.be/fbbSCqaeWyA
7y ago

ColanR 7y ago

If there was ever a crucial moment for Boeing to play dirty, this would be it. I can imagine that a single failure of this crewed rocket flight would just about end SpaceX's relationship with NASA.

ecpottinger 7y ago
Which would mean SpaceX will just go it alone. It really would look bad for NASA if SpaceX then does manned missions that NASA can't do. NASA can not count on the SLS to do the job, if only because it costs do much to launch the SLS that NASA can not afford many missions with it.
- nikofeyn 7y ago
  > It really would look bad for NASA if SpaceX then does manned missions that NASA can't do. that's been the case for almost a decade now. just replace spacex with the soyuz rocket.
Robotbeat 7y ago
Doubt it. Boeing and other companies are filled with people who just want spaceflight to succeed.
aguyfromnb 7y ago
>If there was ever a crucial moment for Boeing to play dirty, this would be it. Yeah, Boeing is going to sabotage this launch, just like Big Oil, Big Auto, Big Media and Big ShortSeller sabotage Tesla. These companies have a delusional fanbase.
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  Don't forget about Tory Bruno's sniper
bluGill 7y ago
While possible I doupt they will. You sabotage your competitors in congress if you can. However operations like this should be allowed and even cheered. The worst case now for Boeing is a series of disasters that leaves the public unwilling to fund anymore space thus killing not only SpaceX, but also Boeing. If Boeing sabotages SpaceX not only do they risk that they also risk getting caught by the investigation which would be bad for Boeing. Note that unsuccessful sabotage meaning you are caught is a real risk as well.

nickik 7y ago

> American astronauts on American rockets from American soil Jim Bridenstine Jim Bridenstine really knows how to talk politics. I must say I very impressed with his tenure so far, the NASA Administrator is not really all that powerful of a position but given how much opposition there was to him being a Trump selection he does do well. This is such a vital step to make LEO a commercial domain. NASA is spending way to much money on LEO and to make any moon/mars future possible that needs to be commercial. NASA only want to launch max. 4 people per ship, but it can take 7. So the price could really be cheap pretty cheap to allow a fair amount of non-NASA groups to send up people. Axiom Space got the contract extending the ISS and a more commercial ISS could operate more efficiently in the longer run. Eventually, with the cost of Cargo Space transportation coming down, we could actually build Space Stations in Space and make them way bigger.

yingw787 7y ago
I think NASA is usually a politically safe place to be. Airplane crashes are unpopular and media-friendly. Rocket explosions or shuttle crashes (esp. with people on them) often result in an Oval Office address. Nobody wants to be on the short end of that stick. Funding is spread out across the U.S. esp. Texas and Florida to ensure broad political support (or at least apathy), and scientists and engineers don't make too much fuss. It's like the military's baby brother. For a long time, I was cynical about even the principle of going to space before we solved problems down here, but now I'm more stoic and appreciative. It's a tangible, tractable hope that gets people out of bed in the morning, and consciously keeping that candle lit is the very best of being human.
- jedberg 7y ago
  > Funding is spread out across the U.S. esp. Texas and Florida to ensure broad political support Heh, maybe now. But when NASA was created, the reason Texas was involved at all was because Senator Johnson (future President Johnson) was the head of the committee that pushed the bill to create NASA. Technically it made no sense for mission control and training to be in Texas. It would be far more efficient in Florida. Florida was chosen because it is the best spot to launch rockets in the US from a physics perspective (closer to the equator is better) that still had easy access from the rest of the US (which is why Hawaii was ruled out even though it would be technically better). But yes, as a side effect of the political posturing to get NASA funded, it ended up spreading the money around the country nicely.

skunkworker 7y ago

It looks like SpaceX will gain the pride of having the 8 by 12 inch American flag left by the last shuttle mission. "The shuttle replica accompanied an expected presentation of a U.S. flag that was flown on the first and last shuttle missions. The 8- by 12-inch flag, which was revealed by President Barack Obama during his call to the astronauts last week, will stay on board the station until the shuttle's successor arrives. "This flag represents not just a symbol of our national pride and honor, but in this particular case, it represents a goal," Ferguson said. "This flag will be flown prominently here by the forward hatch of Node 2, to be returned to Earth once again by an astronaut that launches on a U.S. vehicle, hopefully in just a few years." [9 Weird Things That Flew On NASA's Shuttles] Both the model and flag were hung near and on the hatch where 35 space shuttle crews have entered the station and where the STS-135 astronauts exited for a final time soon after presenting the mementos." https://www.space.com/12335-shuttle-astronauts-flag-model-space-station-tribute.html https://www.space.com/12335-shuttle-astronauts-flag-model-sp...

corywright 7y ago
Doug Hurley was the pilot on the shuttle crew that left the flag on the ISS, and will be the commander of the crew that brings it back to Earth.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  There are several very large assumptions implicit in that sentence.
  - gputhrowaway630 7y ago
    Hurley is going to be the "Spacecraft Commander" as mentioned in the article. The parent comment also indicates that they will be bringing the flag/memorial/token back. I'm not sure what "large implicit assumptions" you are referring too.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      - mission not being scrubbed for a variety of possible reasons - mission commander not being changed - rocket not blowing up on the pad - rocket reaching correct orbit - mission not being completed, for instance docking issues - everything that could possibly go wrong on the return flight Really, the ease with which everybody seems to assume that this will go off without a hitch is impressive, this is not exactly walking to the corner store to pick up a small parcel.

croh 7y ago

Isn't it the stupidest thing to do in current situation ? Endangering lives of crews, operations and families.

greedo 7y ago
I think NASA and SpaceX can quarantine a crew safely, and can manage the operations.
- Symmetry 7y ago
  They've been quarantining astronauts before launch ever since that incident in the Gemini program.
vermontdevil 7y ago
We just launched three astronauts last week. They have quarantine process they've been using for years even before COVID-19 came up.
- cm2187 7y ago
  First I am not aware that these three astronauts are the only people required to launch that rocket. And it feels very much like "do as I say not as I do" from the government. How is it an essential activity?
  - m4rtink 7y ago
    Essential as in the first and so far only permanent manned orbital station with countless research projects ongoing & likely tens of thousand of people supporting the project directly and indirectly by their jobs ? ISS is not really designed to operate unmanned for any length of time & you could easily loose it due to some simple failure that the crew on board can easily address.
    - cm2187 7y ago
      Well, tell that to the hundreds of thousands of small businesses that are going out of business, that your toy up there is more important than their livelihood.

mrfusion 7y ago

It’s a shame no one will be allowed to watch it :-(