6 ms·
SpaceX/ISS fly-under, coverage starts at 11:30 pm PDT
- jonah 14y agoFirst burn now scheduled for around 1:00 am PDT, second burn (for 2.5 km approach) at 1:43 am PDT.
- damncabbage 14y agoFriday 6:30am UTC, with first burn at 8am and then second at 8:43am. (That's Friday 4:30pm, 6pm and 6:43pm for Sydney-siders. :D )
- ColinWright 14y agoDo you mean Thursday?
- johnchristopher 14y agoI wished worldwide events were announced with local time and some unique universal time the whole world would agree on (gmt ? umt? utc? sw@tch ?) that could easily be converted once you know your location's offset. It would make my life easier. edit: man date date -u jeudi 24 mai 2012, 11:00:31 (UTC+0000) TZ='America/Los_Angeles' date jeudi 24 mai 2012, 04:00:55 (UTC-0700) date --date='TZ="America/Los_Angeles" 11:30pm' vendredi 25 mai 2012, 08:30 (UTC+0200) Might be handy to keep that under my belt for future references. Of course events reported or announced at the time they are happening are going to throw me off by a day.
- ColinWright 14y agoMy point is that he said: Friday 6:30am UTC, with first burn at 8am and then second at 8:43am The burns took place on Thursday 8am and 8:43am UTC. Many NASA and SpaceX announcements do include UTC times, although not all. I also wish there were consistency, but it's not as bad as you seem to be implying.
- ash 14y ago"...am UTC" sounds awfull for those of us who don't use am/pm system. And we are the majority!
- sparknlaunch12 14y agoLooks like those guys in mission control are having a blast. One guy appeared to be sleeping. Slightly unrelated but underneath the video it has a live counter of views. "1159 current / 944428 total views"
- Mizza 14y agoAll the NASA guys are wearing ties and all the SpaceX guys are wearing black t-shirts and jeans. Interpret as you will.
- mukaiji 14y agoI thought the exact same thing! Also, one of the spacex guy in the front is in flip-flops.
- jonah 14y agoAlthough there's a magic 8 ball on the CATO desk at the ISS control center. ;) Oh, and a baseball bat on the ADCO desk.
- fidotron 14y agoIt is quite amusing that you can see the NASA bureaucracy by comparison. Things like the printers, choice of desk systems . . .
- InclinedPlane 14y agoYa know, that could be as simple as East coast vs. West coast office attire.
- Lambdanaut 14y agoAnecdotally as somebody sitting on the east coast in a start-up's office right now, everyone in this room is wearing a t-shirt with jeans/shorts. I see some flip flops peeking out here and there too. I think it's more of a Start-up vs. Corporate office attire. SpaceX's culture is more Fresh Silicon Valley Startup than it is corporate. And of course there is a huge concentration of Start-ups on the west coast.
- kristofferR 14y agoHere's a low-def link for people on sucky connections. The HD stream didn't exactly work very well here in Cambodia. http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-mobile http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-mobile
- kristopher 14y agoCountdown Timer via TimeAndDate.com: http://www.timeanddate.com/counters/customcounter.html?msg=SpaceX+Falcon+9+%2F+Dragon+COTS+2+Fly-Under&day=24&month=05&year=2012&hour=01&min=43&sec=0&p0=224 http://www.timeanddate.com/counters/customcounter.html?msg=S...
- bostonvaulter2 14y agoThanks for that, converting time-zones is a huge pain.
- kristofferR 14y agohttp://www.worldtimebuddy.com/ http://www.worldtimebuddy.com/ makes it quite easy.
- rplnt 14y agoSo it did already happen? Or there are more of them, or what? Because from what I hear it still sounds like they are preparing for it.
- ColinWright 14y agoSee elsewhere, but ... They've done the correction burn to put them in the same orbit, but 2.4 lower than the ISS. They will undertake in an hour or so from now, passing between the ISS and the Earth. When some distance ahead they will burn again and rise into a slower orbit and let the ISS undertake them, thus dropping behind. Finally, they will go back down to a holding point, and wait till tomorrow while they check all the data. Tomorrow they do a similarly detailed set of moves, ending up a hundred metres away, when they will be captured by the robotic arm, and docked. See the image on this page: http://nssphoenix.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/spacex-dragon-flight-readiness-review/ http://nssphoenix.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/spacex-dragon-fli... http://nssphoenix.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/638592main_03_mission_profile_metric.jpg http://nssphoenix.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/638592main_03_...
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- jonah 14y agoNASA has paid SpaceX $381mm to date for the 37 of 40 tasks in the COTS program. So, private industry, yes, but a lot of public assistance in achieving this. [edit]: Not bashing the arrangement at all. Just pointing out the deep history and current support, both technical and financial.
- sasha-dv 14y agoThe NASA's decision to support SpaceX with money and expertise is a step in the right direction. NASA (and Roscosmos) should delegate to private companies all of the operations in LEO. They should focus their efforts on sending humans deeper into space. I want to see a day when docking at the ISS is considered a boring affair.
- lucian1900 14y agoI agree, except about sending humans deeper into space. It seems much cheaper and more useful to send many, many machines deeper into space.
- rbanffy 14y agoMachines will never describe the surface of a new world as "magnificent desolation". Not really - some day, they'll share this trait with humans - but it will take some time. I want humans to experience this, even if briefly, before our much more capable successors take the lead from us relics.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoThe goal of spaceflight is not merely exploration, it is also colonization, and adventure. The rest of the Universe is just a place, and humans will go there. Not because it is the only way to learn about it, but merely because we can.
- marvin 14y agoDo these $381MM include launch costs?
- picklefish 14y agoCould someone explain the steps until docking? What exactly is the fly under / first burn / second burn?
- marvin 14y agoToday, SpaceX is just testing/demonstrating to NASA that the Dragon capsule is, in fact, capable of performing the precise navigation required to dock with the ISS. So the diagram they keep showing on NASA TV is the scheduled "test track" which will take the capsule around the space station. Additional and more precise maneuvers will be tested tomorrow before the docking takes place. Due to the vaccuum of space, firing the rocket engines (a "burn") is required for any change in direction (the effects of gravity nonwithstanding). The burns we are looking at right now are to move the Dragon capsule closer to the ISS in the vertical dimension: First one burn to accellerate it upwards towards the ISS, and then a second burn to level it off and stop moving upwards. It will still have its _horizontal_ velocity relative to the space station after the second burn.
- picklefish 14y agoExactly what I wanted to know. Much appreciated.
- sneak 14y agoIt's been a minute since I've watched NASA TV. Do you think they have enough US flags on the desks there in Mission Control? I'm a fan of American industry and the private sector, but man does that sort of overt ueber-patriotic nationalism give me the willies. Maybe it's because I live in Berlin and it's pretty obvious what becomes of countries in the period right after that becomes widespread. Ugh.
- fleitz 14y agoHopefully the US doesn't start bringing back the flag salute, it is interesting how both regimes borrow heavily from roman symbolism.
- jonah 14y agoWho knows, they may represent the nationality of the staff member. I don't think it's too bad, there aren't huge flags hanging from the walls.
- evride 14y agoI wouldn't fear any uber-patriotic nationalism from them just because they have flags on their desk. HR probably just hands them out with the name plates to everyone when they're hired. My mother works for a city government office and they handed out those flags for birthdays last year. She wasn't happy about it at all. What it's a sign of is some Chinese company making a lot of money off cheap trinkets.
- sneak 14y agoNo, it's symptomatic of a growing and powerful trend in thinking and attitudes of the members of the US Government. http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1779544,00.html http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1779544,00....
- Mithrandir 14y agohttp://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/SSapplications/Post/JavaSSOP/JavaSSOP.html http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/SSapplication... ^ Tells you when you can view the ISS outside. I guess sky-viewing isn't as detailed as the webcast, but it's still pretty cool.
- obilgic 14y agoLady@NASA is continuously eating something.
- phoboslab 14y agoIt's weird how much time they spend with copying (talking) numbers back and forth over a crappy voice connection. Wouldn't a simple text chat (IRC maybe) make this way more efficient and less error prone?
- rplnt 14y agoYou can't type with your hands full :)
- ColinWright 14y agoTyping in weightless conditions is tricky, and when you're also performing a task, talking is way, way easier. The back-and-forth is a formal protocol designed to minimise (prevent!) errors, and the rate of communication is rarely the limiting factor, and for many, speaking, even with the repetitions, is faster than typing. Especially in micro-gravity. With your hands full.
- phoboslab 14y agoInteresting. It never occurred to me that typing with your hands floating around may not be as easy as on earth. I was just watching as one crew member was calibrating a camera, probably by using a laptop(?), and he had to repeat a number 3 times till ground copied correctly. I just thought "damn, he could just copy and paste these numbers into a chat session". But then again, why aren't these numbers transmitted automatically in the first place?
- polyfractal 14y agoEither because verbal communication is a "holdover" from the Apollo era, or because it is the safest way to confirm everything is correct. We place a lot of trust in our computers...but when a single typo can mean life or death I think I'd prefer to verbally confirm the number too.
- ColinWright 14y agoIt's really, really hard to figure out how to get absolutely every possible thing you might ever want to be accessible all the time. It's really, really easy in a given instance, with hindsight, to say - "Why not just transmit that all anyway?" Yes, it's a good question, but it's a better question when you think to ask it 10 years before you need the data. I work remotely with safety-critical systems, and sometimes I curse the lack of foresight on the part of the engineers and designers who came before me. Then I wonder what equipment people will be using 5 years from now to interface with the systems I'm trying to get out the door on time and on budget.
- ColinWright 14y agoDragon module spotted by the ISS cameras. Stunning.
- marvin 14y agohttp://imgur.com/If7Ze http://imgur.com/If7Ze
- Mithrandir 14y agohttp://i.imgur.com/BnUKf.png http://i.imgur.com/BnUKf.png Edit: Here it is again, 1 and 1/2 miles below the ISS, http://i.imgur.com/KngeN.png http://i.imgur.com/KngeN.png
- jacquesm 14y agoI was watching 'The Aviator' just the other day and I realized that at some point someone will make a movie called 'the Astronaut' or something like it about Elon Musk. If SpaceX goes public I'll buy stock. To me it will mean investing in humanity and in our collective future.
- Arjuna 14y agoIn a 60 Minutes interview [1], Scott Pelley [2] asked Garrett Reisman [3]: Pelley: "You know, I'm curious... you have so much background in engineering, you could have easily gotten a job at Boeing, or at Lockheed, but you came here..." Reisman: "If you had a chance to go back in time, and work with Howard Hughes when he was creating TWA, if you had a chance to be there, at that moment, when it was the dawn of a brand new era, wouldn't you want to do that? I mean, that's why I'm here." [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNwg8FvfuuU#t=425 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNwg8FvfuuU#t=425 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Pelley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Pelley [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrett_Reisman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrett_Reisman