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NASA Astronauts Return Home in SpaceX's Crew Dragon Spacecraft [video]
- dencodev 6y agoRe-entry happening some time tomorrow. Cool to see the ISS separation though!
- dghughes 6y agoI waited all day to see it live but then I had to take the cat in from outside. And missed the live undocking. Plus I got bitten.
- kanox 6y agoNot yet, not until re-entry. It's arguably the most dangerous part of the missions since launching on Falcon 9 has happened many times before. Both Soyuz and the Space Shuttle had fatal accidents on re-entry.
- boardwaalk 6y agoI don’t believe SpaceX has ever not tried and succeeded to return a Dragon sent to ISS back to Earth.
- Robotbeat 6y agoThat is true, but it has only had one successful reentry (one out of one attempts) of a Dragon Crew capsule design (which, granted, is only slightly different than Dragon Cargo).
- chrisweekly 6y agoFor clarity: I think "tried and not succeeded" is the intended phrasing.
- boardwaalk 6y agoI meant “not (tried and succeeded).” English is great.
- caconym_ 6y agoYou're not wrong, but I think it's cool how much safer the generic capsule design is than something like the Shuttle. Really the Shuttle got a whole lot wrong—heat-intolerant aluminum structure and critical, sensitive machinery directly beneath a layer of tiles so fragile you can crush them in your hands (IIRC). SpaceX's Starship will probably be a lot more tolerant to defects in the heat shield because of the relatively heat-tolerant steel underneath, but landing safely relies on the operation of massive aero surfaces and a relight of the engines with thrust vectoring. It'll be interesting to see how that goes.
- zitterbewegung 6y agoThis is at the stage where you cant really make assumptions about what may happen because you don't know what could go wrong. (A.K.A you don't know what you don't know).
- free_rms 6y agoI'm not claiming that OP or I are experts, but there's actually a pretty big body of knowledge for capsule re-entry. It's more 'known problems' than 'unknown unknowns'.
- caconym_ 6y agoAll you need to bring a traditional capsule design down to ~sea level terminal velocity safely is a blunt body with offset CG and the kind of circular ablative heat shield that's been shown over decades to be simple, safe and reliable. You don't even need active control unless you want more precision for hitting your landing target. The biggest risk, assuming your position and velocity were correct at interface, is the parachutes–which is why SpaceX took so much time testing and refining them. Things can always go wrong, but we know enough about both classes of vehicle to be able to say that the Shuttle's design was in general terms both more complex and more risky. This is slightly off topic, but the Shuttle was horribly unsafe on the way up as well as on the way down. Using solid rocket boosters with no means to get the crew safely off the stack until they stop burning is, for lack of a better word, demented. The Crew Dragon/Falcon 9 stack offers realistic abort modes from the moment fueling begins until the vehicle reaches its intended orbit.
- diebeforei485 6y agoDragon has come back before (without crew) so this isn't a total unknown.
- manicdee 6y agoAfter reentry the next most dangerous part of the entire launch/return process is likely landing at sea and being rescued by helicopters or ships. So I will be holding my metaphoric breath until the astronauts are delivered from SpaceX responsibility to NASA responsibility, which should be on land somewhere in Florida (too lazy to look it up sorry not sorry)
- martyvis 6y agoThe Crew Dragon is very similar to the Cargo Dragon that has already had nearly 20 returns from orbit without incident, so there is already quite a bit of experience in the systems that will be used tomorrow.
- yesenadam 6y agoThe first comment I saw in the live chat was "You people have it wrong, space is flat, not earth".
- cheschire 6y agoWell from what I’ve read the observable universe is fairly flat, but I was wondering what if we’re just living in a basin or on a plateau that extends beyond our observable reach? I suck at math though so I’ll just wait for theoretical astrophysicists to tell me interesting things on blogs.
- leetrout 6y agoI’ve always pondered a mobius strip with a river-like motion .
- justSayin000001 6y agoWould that be a mobius strip of universes? That makes me think of the central finite curve from Rick and Morty.
- tomphoolery 6y agoThen we can all say we live "in the Valley"!
- komali2 6y agoWe all live in the valley on this blessed day
- kl4m 6y agoEstimates set the lower bound at 250x the size of the observable universe, according to the limits of measurement of the "flatness" of our local space. https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.5476 https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.5476
- MiguelVieira 6y ago
- Animats 6y agoWhat's the link for the technical feed? Right now someone is filling time with a history of the ISS.
- dylan604 6y agoHit the rewind button to see the departure. All of the "action" is pretty much done for today. They are now just floating through space waiting for the next burn. Tomorrow afternoon will be the re-entry an splash down activity
- raldi 6y agoMods, a better headline would say "returning", or that they've departed the ISS. They haven't returned to the surface yet.
- pjfin123 6y agoI can't easily link to it because it's still live streaming but at 4:10 in they seem to be debugging a local internet/HTML error on their iPads. Next level debugging in production.
- samkater 6y agoI just had to go find that for myself! Here's the link to 4:10:45 when they start talking about it - https://youtu.be/13OkD0C_TWU?t=15045 https://youtu.be/13OkD0C_TWU?t=15045
- TeMPOraL 6y agoRelated, I wonder if there's going to be a postmortem on this mission on the UI, because from the brief scenes when its shown updating or being clicked on, it looks to have a responsiveness on the order of half a second.
- m0xte 6y agoThink it’s Electron. Doesn’t surprise me. I wouldn’t want to take slack into space with me.
- madeofpalk 6y agoI'm fairly certain there's no Electron on iPad (can't take Chrome to iPad). I also don't think that a native wrapper app that loads (local) html files would display a "Safari" error message. It was probably just a cached/saved website saved to the home screen. I'm not a rocket scientist, but as a web developer, I would rely upon that for anything earth-bound, let alone in Space.
- interestica 6y ago> I'm not a rocket scientist, but as a web developer, I would rely upon that for anything earth-bound, let alone in Space. ...would?
- iblaine 6y agoThe SpaceX crew land in Florida at 2:48 p.m. ET on Sunday.
- Jaruzel 6y agoOr 19:48 for those of us in the UK. NASA/SpaceX really should start using UTC for their timestamps.
- kelnos 6y agoI feel like it's not at all weird to say that something is arriving somewhere in that somewhere's local time zone.
- Jaruzel 6y agoBut, NASA has a global audience. At least have UTC as a secondary time.
- aaronmdjones 6y agoPlus, the ISS' timezone is also UTC.
- unnouinceput 6y agoISS circles Earth every ~1.5 hours, which is ~16 times per day, so it does makes sense to have UTC. Land however is fixed, with its own timezone. I second another answer, local timezone primary and UTC secondary is best.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoI agree with local and UTC, as long as both are there. Local is useful for locals, but the audience of a landing is pretty much global.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
- nicholascamera 6y agoThe ship departs from the station at 2 hours 19 minutes.
- mkl 6y agoThe video seems to be no longer live, so times have changed (?). Undocking now starts at 6m45s: https://youtu.be/13OkD0C_TWU?t=400 https://youtu.be/13OkD0C_TWU?t=400 Physical separation is at 11m35s: https://youtu.be/13OkD0C_TWU?t=695 https://youtu.be/13OkD0C_TWU?t=695
- mechhacker 6y agoReally glad I got to drive out and watch this launch. It was fantastic seeing us send people back into space again.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- redis_mlc 6y ago1) The ISS is in LEO. Calling it space is absurd. 2) The ISS should have been deorbited years ago. 3) NASA is not for your personal entertainment. Go watch NASCAR if you need a thrill.
- marmshallow 6y ago*are returning home. They haven’t made it back yet. They are on track to land 11:48am PT on Sunday
- tjpnz 6y agoWhat happens in the event of a parachute failure? Would they be in a position where they could fire up the Super Dracos for a propulsive landing?
- p1mrx 6y agoThey originally designed Dragon 2 for propulsive landing, but NASA didn't approve it, and then development focus shifted to Starship. I don't think anyone (outside of SpaceX) knows whether the feature still exists for emergency use; perhaps they never finished the software.
- paranoidrobot 6y agoThere are four parachutes. It's designed to support at least a single-chute failure, I don't know about multiple chute outages. As for propulsive landing - the latest I can see[1] is that while the craft is technically capable of propulsive landing, it's not approved by NASA, even for emergencies. So it's likely that these options are not even available for the crew, and they wouldn't have trained on how to use it/activate it. [1] https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-crew-dragon-emergency-landing/ https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-crew-dragon-emergency-landi...
- sebazzz 6y agoNot even for emergencies? Does that mean that it is officially not there, but in the unlikely unlikely event it can be used, or that it really isn't there anymore and the capsule would just drop dead on the ground?
- anticensor 6y agoIt is there, just not certified for this use. However, if they manage to make a successful ememgency propulsive landing (even an unaccounted one), it will be investigated and then approved post-facto. The engines used for landing are the same engines that are used for post-second-stage maneuvreing.
- Kliment 6y ago
- m0zg 6y agoBusiness is owned by an African-American, too.
- throwawaysea 6y agoUndocking stream ran earlier and can be found at https://youtu.be/13OkD0C_TWU https://youtu.be/13OkD0C_TWU, with the undocking procedure beginning 2 hours 14 minutes in. The actual separation is at 2 hours 19 minutes. Currently there is a live stream of the autonomous “return coast” phase while the crew sleeps: https://youtu.be/zMsxviPT2Cw https://youtu.be/zMsxviPT2Cw The splashdown stream is at https://youtu.be/tSJIQftoxeU https://youtu.be/tSJIQftoxeU and starts at 4:25 AM PDT, with deorbiting expected around 10:55 AM PDT.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bserge 6y agoPerseverance also launched a few days ago: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/ https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/ Hopefully the landing is just as smooth as Curiosity's. It would be really cool to see actual, high quality footage of it, but at least there's the simulated renderings. Extremely impressive.
- jvm___ 6y agoThere are multiple landing cameras this time.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]