26 ms·
Crew Dragon Docks with ISS
- Kaibeezy 6y ago“flew exactly like the simulators”
- gpm 6y agoThey did complain about the thermal camera cutting out as the thrusters fired in real life and not in the simulator at one point. Was that fixed in the later test?
- bkanber 6y agoI thought what I heard is that the thermal cameras did cut out even in the sim, but that on-ship they cut out differently. My assumption is that this is something that gets fixed on the ground.
- mchusma 6y agoI was surprised they slept on the trip. I assume they took turns.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoAutopilot :)
- Kaibeezy 6y agoRight? It’s basically a Tesla.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- TeMPOraL 6y agoYeah. Except autopilot is easier in space than on the road, because it doesn't have to take into account the multitudes of vehicles (and pedestrians) without an autopilot, just zooming around.
- yellowapple 6y agoI mean, not yet. Someday, though...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- InTheArena 6y agoNot usually. They learned early on in the space program that in capsules, you don’t have enough sound isolation to make different sleep schedules work. My understanding is that they then plan on having the crew sleep at the same time.
- rtkwe 6y agoNo need, the burns are all scheduled and they can plan that to avoid doing anything while the crew is asleep.
- flixic 6y agoYou can try docking yourself at https://iss-sim.spacex.com https://iss-sim.spacex.com
- ericol 6y agoTook me 3 tries to do it; my bad was not carefully reading the instructions.
- cbhl 6y agoFirst three times I tried doing it by eye and ended up hopelessly lost. Needed to pull out my trigonometry to figure out how to line up the capsule to get the Y/Z aligned...
- yellowapple 6y agoI got it on the first try, but only because I've got 600+ hours of Kerbal Space Program under my belt (where docking is much harder when you consider that docking in KSP entails actually getting to the target and doing it with imbalanced RCS thrusters that I placed on the craft willy-nilly; SpaceX's online docking sim was a breeze in comparison). Trick was to get rotation aligned first, then worry about translation. And yeah, might as well ignore visual; just went by the numbers.
- stoneman24 6y agoI had a terrible first attempt. Then discovered the same procedure, sort the rotation to 0, then minimise the translation and finally approach the dock. Head down And concentrate on the numbers. I didn’t have the KSP experience to fall back on. I wish they had added a timer as I am now trying for my fastest time.
- yellowapple 6y agoYeah, the live stream mentioned the ability to switch between coarse and fine controls, and that ability would be invaluable for a speed run.
- MobileVet 6y agoHatch opening scheduled for approximately 12:30pm EDT Edit: time slipping
- jtdev 6y agoHow much AI/ML do you think is running on the software associated with this launch and docking? I suspect there’s a great deal of very explicit, well tested code, but very little AI/ML.
- jtwaleson 6y agoI agree (having no actual knowledge). What would be the benefit?
- ahsima1 6y agoI would guess none. Maybe some in testing/simulations, but I highly doubt there is any ML doing actual flight control.
- moftz 6y agoVery little in terms of what you would consider AI or ML. It's a lot of trig and control theory. You do a lot of the math beforehand to figure out the script the craft will follow to reach the ISS. Once it gets close, you either use manual controls or let autopilot do the docking. The autopilot is basically looking some dots on a camera and firing the thrusters to make the dots line up right. It's more like a dumb PID controller than an AI. The autopilot isn't learning anything or somehow making connections that weren't already programmed. This is all stuff NASA figured out how to do in the 60s so it's nothing novel except for the mission and the hardware the math is done on.
- InTheArena 6y agoJust like regular autopilot on the ground, the AI/ML is really just in the image / signal recognition. After that it’s mostly control law (rules based system, and force calculations0.
- landa 6y agoWhat you wrote is what I would have guessed. Are you also guessing or do you know for sure? It sounds right, but I'm very curious about the actual answer to this question.
- jari_mustonen 6y agoWe are a small step closer inhabiting Mars. When we will, it will be the most important event in the five billion years history of our solar system. In other words, we are witnessing some pretty cool stuff.
- Hamuko 6y agoHow does this get us closer to getting people to Mars?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sq_ 6y agoSpaceX has now successfully launched humans into orbit and rendezvoused with an orbital station. Of course, it’s a different vehicle than what they hope to one day take to Mars, but that’s still a huge step for any spacefaring organization to have made, especially when the stated overarching goal is to move huge numbers of people to a new planet.
- Kaibeezy 6y agoCan’t tell if serious or troll. Successful human spaceflight on reusable hardware > lower cost to orbit of personnel > increased economic activity in orbit > construction of manufacturing facilities > scale up of materials, capability, endurance and knowledge > ability to construct and launch Mars ships and supply a colony Or something like that.
- Hamuko 6y agoLower cost to orbit, sure. Increased economic activity in orbit? Where does that part come from? It's not like we haven't sent people to the ISS before. And it's not like SpaceX hasn't managed to reuse hardware before. It's basically just a mix of those two things. Really the most significant things about this were that astronauts were launched to space from the US and it was a private company. And out of those, the first thing is really more symbolic than anything else. The ISS is about 400 km from the surface of the Earth. Mars is like what, 225 000 000 km?
- bane 6y agoSpaceX runs basically as a giant R&D program that also happens to accomplish useful things as byproducts of its approach (with the miracle of insurance to cover costs if things get explody). Every flight is data for incremental improvement. If you think of all SpaceX has ever done was try to get to this point, with somewhere around 80 flights on the Falcon 9, but for a variety of mission buyers (NASA, USAF, Commercial Sat companies, SpaceX itself!), somewhere around $5b (~$60m a launch) has been spent getting an entirely new, ground-up manned space program up and running to include launch vehicle with a majority re-usability. But along the way, numerous satellites and other stuff ended up in space as well. This allowed NASA to also split the R&D bill with multiple "partners". To put this into context, the Mercury program ran about $2.25b in today's dollars, Gemini ran $7.3b ($723m per mission!). The Space Shuttle program had a lifetime cost of $209b ($1.5b per flight!!!) If you think the Shuttle program is not comparable, the F9Heavy program, a derivative of this other work, can put up more mass than the Shuttle, managed to split much of the development costs with the Falcon 9, can land most of its mass, and has a per flight cost of $90m. We now have the capability to put up another ISS today, resupply it, and staff it, at a fraction of the cost, all with launch equipment made by a single company that started a decade ago as a side project for a guy who was trying to make electric cars after making money on the internet. This is a ridiculous bargain and Spacex isn't even close to done yet.
- starik36 6y agoAll true, however, (splitting hairs, yes), the reason FH9 can best the shuttle boosters is because they had to carry the shuttle itself, which was around 50 tons.
- bane 6y agoI wonder, as a percentage of launch vehicle, how much mass the shuttle program managed to reuse after a mission vs. the F9Heavy? It turns out not having to "shuttle" half a dozen humans up to orbit every time you want to get something up there is a good idea.
- yellowapple 6y ago
- haunter 6y agoCurrently they have problems with the voice between ISS and Dragon. There is a huge interference and they can't read it. Funny enough we the viewers hear it loud and clear
- moftz 6y agoI'm sure an easy workaround would be to use Houston as a relay rather than direct communication.
- haunter 6y agoYep that's what they are doing now
- ducktective 6y agoI thought they already could communicate on wireless bands? No need for relay... They wanted to have a "wired" communication set up correctly IIUC.
- mattowen_uk 6y agoThey were trying to get the 'Hard wire' link working - which is the direct cable link between the ISS and Dragon. What we were all hearing, was the 'Big Loop' which is comms via Mission Control, SpaceX, Dragon, and the ISS - which carries a couple of seconds delay. 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.
- hinkley 6y agoI recall Elon was hoping to get an order of magnitude reduction in cost per launch, but Wikipedia claims it costs $160 million per launch versus the Soyuz price of $76 million per astronaut. That would “only” be a 3x reduction with a crew of seven, but they’ve configured for a crew of four, which is a hair under 2x. I wonder how reuse affects the math, and what they’ll be able to do to lower those prices further. Obviously the optics on getting a domestic launch for half the price makes it an easy sale for Congress, but we were all hoping for more. An order of magnitude reduction might have gotten us 20x as many launches.
- hinkley 6y agoWikipedia is either wrong or out of date but the ratios are slightly worse at 40% cheaper than Soyuz: https://www.space.com/spacex-boeing-commercial-crew-seat-prices.html 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.
- loufe 6y agoI would be interested to see the quote. Was he hoping for a 10-fold drop right off the bat for the first mission or rather for that drop "à un moment donné". I imagine the costs will continue to go down with time for the base model as things become more reusable, R&D costs drop, and more business comes their way.
- hinkley 6y agoIf memory serves, that 10x isn't even really his number, but one borrowed from the enthusiast community. So not only was that number aspirational, but it was also a nod to a bunch of people who are essentially all talk and no action. Also I found that if you fly on a refurb unit you get a 30% reduction in price, so a budget flier is looking at a 3x improvement in cost, which is quite a lot closer to the goal multiple. If those numbers are profitable for SpaceX, and not fiction, then hopefully they have enough revenue to fund iterations that improve on what they already have.
- orisho 6y agoThey mentioned something about the suit pressure for one of them being lower than expected and asked them to check for "white teeth" on 3 zippers, which they reported seeing on all 3. Can anyone explain what that is?
- scrumbledober 6y agoSounds like when the zippers are fully closed the white teeth of the zipper should be covered by the seal around the zipper. If any teeth are visible the seal is not complete.
- hinkley 6y agoOr perhaps the seal is behind the zipper and high contrast.
- hinkley 6y agoI thought maybe they put some sort of chemistry into the zipper to detect gasses and change colors, but I can’t get google to cooperate. And what gas in the suit isn’t already in the cabin?
- rtkwe 6y agoThey did a leak check and one of their suits wasn't 100% sealed so it had a lower pressure differential to the capsule during their tests meaning there was a seal that wasn't completely sealed. The teeth thing is that they use different colored teeth on zippers so they can see visually when they've closed the zipper fully. They said it was still within the margin of keeping them protected during an emergency though.
- anewdirection 6y agoIf the suits are pressurized more than the environment, escaping gasses often cause moisture or frost to form at the point of escape due to differential cooling condenstion. Could that be what they were seeing?
- swimfar 6y agoSpaceX Live Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIZsnKGV8TE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIZsnKGV8TE Docking begins to occur around 3:10PM GMT in the video. This link may send you to that point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIZsnKGV8TE&t=695m0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIZsnKGV8TE&t=695m0s Is there an easy way to link to a specific time in live videos? I had to manually play around with the time to find the right point.
- cletus 6y agoSo when seeing this I had two questions, one of which I've found the answer to, one of which still remains a mystery. 1. Why only two astronauts? and 2. How much is Crew Dragon costing? For (1), it's stated [1] that Crew Dragon has a capacity of seven astronauts but only 4 for NASA? How does that work? Does that mean the NASA configuration only has 4 seats? I found this [2] saying seats 1 and 4 were empty. Why not 4 astronauts? The answer seems to be that this is technically a test flight (Crew Demo-2). Passing this will fully certify Dragon. I guess it's better to risk 2 astronauts than 4. It probably also depends how many people you want to have on the ISS. As for (2), I found this [3], which states the cost at $55m per astronaut. This seems... high? A full complement of 4 would cost $210m. Falcon 9 launches cost a fraction of that. Even Falcon Heavy is ~$90m. For some reason I thought SpaceX was enabling sending up 7 astronauts for <$100m. Compared to Soyuz [4], which cost NASA $80m/astronaut, that's a saving but not as much as I would've thought. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_2 [2]: https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew/2020/05/30/all-aboard-astronauts-ingress-crew-dragon/ https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew/2020/05/30/all-aboard-... [3]: https://www.space.com/spacex-boeing-commercial-crew-seat-prices.html https://www.space.com/spacex-boeing-commercial-crew-seat-pri... [4]: https://www.wired.com/story/spacex-launched-two-astronauts-changing-spaceflight-forever/ https://www.wired.com/story/spacex-launched-two-astronauts-c...
- ape4 6y agoMinimum number of astronauts in case of disaster
- hoorayimhelping 6y ago>Why not 4 astronauts? 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.
- ape4 6y agoWatching now.. they were unable to get the "hard line" voice working. VOIP?
- yellowapple 6y agoConsidering how long the ISS has been up there, it could be POTS or something similarly-analog. Dragon→ISS was clear, but ISS→Dragon was not, making me think that maybe there's some wire or connector in the latter direction that's shoddy (and that'd be more common for analog/POTS than digital/VOIP, where such garbling would be bidirectional and/or nothing would be heard on either end). 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.
- ape4 6y agoMakes sense. They just fixed the hard line
- yellowapple 6y agoWas that the hardline or did they reroute through RF and/or "Big Loop"? I heard the loud and clear (and earlier about the cameras possibly interfering) but missed if that loud and clear was through the hardline.
- ape4 6y agoSorry dont know. Did hear mention of big loop
- zoomablemind 6y agoProbably a comm channel in the umbilical, kinda 'landline'. I'd assume the radio comm should be operational.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoWhat's with the gradient shadow? The space station shadow crossed the module, and it was blurry. I thought shadows in space were knife-sharp. The nose-cone shadow was. Its not the stream resolution, is it? Other knife-sharp features were visible. Maybe the space station is fuzzy? Maybe the module material blurs shadows? What am I missing?
- pygy_ 6y agoShadows are blurry unless the source is a point. The gradient is the part of the shadow where the source is partially occluded.
- teraflop 6y agoShadows in space aren't, in general, any sharper than on Earth. The "penumbra" of a shadow -- the blurry, partially-shaded region -- is basically a simple geometric effect, caused by the light source being partially obscured. The penumbra's size is approximately equal to the product of the light source's angular size and the distance from the shadow-casting object to the illuminated surface. (Diffraction has some effect as well, but only on very small scales that aren't particularly relevant here.) 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.
- mkl 6y agoWhere do you mean? If it's a shadow caused by the light of the Earth it will be very fuzzy due to the size of the light source. Even shadows from the sun will be fuzzy if the shadowing object isn't close to the shadowed surface, as the sun is no further away than on Earth, and hence much bigger than the point light source needed for perfectly sharp shadows. 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.
- elliekelly 6y agoFrom NASA's Mission Updates: > The Crew Dragon arrived at the station’s Harmony port, docking at 10:16 a.m. EDT while the spacecraft were flying about 262 miles above the northern border of China and Mongolia. It's hard for me to wrap my brain around this. They seem so far away but 262 miles above earth is about the distance from NYC to DC which doesn't seem far at all.
- jandrese 6y agoThere is a fantastic what if that talks about this. https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/
- bobwaycott 6y agoYou’re right. That was fantastic. Hadn’t seen that one before. Thank you.
- neals 6y agoDid Doug bump his head on the way in?
- war1025 6y agoCame here hoping to find an answer to this. It looked like it was bothering him quite a bit
- pks016 6y agoYes. I noticed that too. Seems like he bumped his head hard. It was quite red. And whats up with the guy with baseball bat while taking photo? Is that normal?
- Geee 6y agoDefinitely not normal.
- hansoolo 6y agoWhy is it such a big deal this time? Don't the Russians fly to ISS all the time?
- djhworld 6y agoFew reasons, it's been 9 years since the last crewed spacecraft took off from American soil. Second reason is this is the first time the spacecraft has been built and run by a commercial company (spacex)
- hansoolo 6y agoFor me (as a European) it is mainly exceptional because of the SpaceX effort. It just appeared to me as if it was something America was proud of, because they invented space flight or something, which they didn't. It's just never "celebrated" anywhere when the Russians fly to space over and over.
- s_y_n_t_a_x 6y agoAmerica is proud because SpaceX is an American company that has made this possible while being commercially viable. It's a testament to American capitalism. It's something to be very proud of. It's the next step in the space age. This paves the way for many more companies and ventures.
- vikramkr 6y agoIt's an awesome example of american capitalism giving us back the ability to put people in space. It's the first steps to true commercialization of spaceflight, with travel driven by tourism, colonization, resource extraction, amd R&D, which is a much more sustainable way to maintain space exploration. And probably most importantly, everything else sucks right now. Coronavirus, widespread protests and race riots. We need a win, and this is a pretty solid one.
- saberdancer 6y agoIt's a capability NASA lost and is not close to achieving, it's a feel good story for USA, it's a really nice thing to improve competition in crewed launch space allowing NASA to go further with bigger missions (Moon and Mars).
- OctaviusCrassus 6y agoUnbelievable what Elon Musk has been able to create for humanity. So grateful for him and this administration. Looking forward to see more free market ingenuity
- stevens32 6y agoFree market doesn't seem correct here since the government is the customer.
- OctaviusCrassus 6y agoGovt is 100% funded from the free market
- stevens32 6y ago> In a free market, the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government or other authority and from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market
- 205guy 6y agoAm I the only one who can hear the Blue Danube Waltz just thinking about Dragon docking at the ISS? https://youtu.be/0ZoSYsNADtY?t=210 https://youtu.be/0ZoSYsNADtY?t=210
- _ah 6y agoI am so excited by this achievement, and offer hearty congratulations to SpaceX and NASA. That said, I think that everyone anticipating a dramatic reduction in orbital cost needs to temper their enthusiasm a bit. UAL was expensive, as many other have previously noted, because it was a political jobs program. The existence of UAL gave the necessary cover for Musk & Co to envision radically more efficient designs. However, that was then. As SpaceX continues to succeed, it will be harder to justify continued funding of UAL at the previous levels. Costs will be cut. People will cheer. And then, a well-meaning congressperson or two (with their eye on re-election) will introduce a rider onto the next funding bill: "Yes we want these great launch capabilities, but at least $1B must be spent within the state of Alabama" (or whatever). This will work for a little while, but then more members of congress will jump on the gravy train. In order for SpaceX to maintain their launch contracts they will need to perform more and more work in distributed places. This will result in reduced organizational efficiency and increased launch cost. The big opportunity here is commercial launch. If SpaceX can grow their civilian and international order book enough, they become less beholden to the US Govt and can push back on make-work contract requirements. But if not... I await their inevitable induction into UAL v2.
- sgtnoodle 6y agoI think your last paragraph is the most likely. SpaceX will simply not accept a government contract that works against their interests since they are a private entity. If starlink pans out, government contracts won't be such an important source of revenue long term.
- cryptonector 6y agoSpaceX exists to make StarLink possible, and would exist whether Congress threw money SpaceX's way or not. That makes SpaceX fairly independent.
- vikramkr 6y agoI think you mean ULA? And yes the plan is commercial launch. NASA is one customer of many and spacex is one supplier of many. NASA's been pretty explicit about not wanting to be the primary customer of rockets, and that they want a robust ecosystem of commercial and sovereign interests making up the market. And spacex has it's own plans for providing internet etc. It's pretty explicitly viewed as a failure of this program by NASA if space is not successfully commercialized and if nasa maintains its dominance as a purchaser of launch contracts.
- kthxbye123 6y agoVery impressive - only sixty years after the Communists put a man into space, the private sector has managed to catch up.
- hartator 6y agoDo we have a link to rewatch both the launch and the docking?