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SpaceX Dragon Successfully Docked With The Space Station
- frade33 13y agoJust do not watch gravity movie tonight. on a serious note, it's friggi' amazing and makes me feel proud of our race every single day.
- spoiler 13y agoI'm curious actually: what's more appropriate to say in such statements: species or race, or something else entirely? I'm guessing It's would be species, but I'm not an expert on biology.
- 001sky 13y agoFYI, "human race" has idiomatic usage in english. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Race
- clef 13y agoBe proud of your race when it solves corruption, poverty and inequalities... You can do something about it, be proud of it and at the same time watch rockets fly http://www.watsi.org http://www.watsi.org
- wyager 13y agoI'm not sure if OP was making a racist statement of meant "the human race", but completely independent of that and in response to your statement: Any technological venture is helping to solve poverty in the long run. Even if the venture does nothing to help inequality, the new technology is almost guaranteed to raise society's collective standard of living.
- rwitoff 13y agoAfter 3 scrubs most of our non-critical colleagues left the cape, but the view of our payloads in the trunk after 2nd stage sep made it all worthwhile. It's amazing what SpaceX has been able to accomplish and reinvent in a business this risk-averse and I can't wait to see what's next.
- modeless 13y agoAny more news on the performance of the first stage recovery test? Elon Musk tweeted that it was successful but I haven't heard anything more detailed than that.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoAccording to Elon it landed: "Data upload from tracking plane shows landing in Atlantic was good! Several boats enroute through heavy seas." -- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/statuses/457307742495993856 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/statuses/457307742495993856 Which is pretty amazing. Apparently the telemetry continued for 6 seconds as it fell over. "Flight computers continued transmitting for 8 seconds after reaching the water. Stopped when booster went horizontal." -- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/statuses/457311780943822848 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/statuses/457311780943822848
- awda 13y agoWell, also according to Musk, its last reported velocity was 360 m/s. That's a pretty hard landing.
- simonh 13y agoThat message was sent while the vehicle was still high up and had not started its powered landing over the water. It was only its last reported velocity at that time, not its last reported velocity now, or even shortly after.
- awda 13y agoAh, did not realize that. Thanks for clarifying.
- ceejayoz 13y agoThat was when it dropped over the horizon from the Cape and they lost telemetry. It was still 8.5 km in the air at that point.
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- iotakodali 13y agoan awesome start for reusable rockets, amazing!!
- Spittie 13y agoSpaceX/Nasa livestreamed the whole docking (sadly I was asleep at the time...). I don't know if the whole footage is up yet, but this is a nice summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fDzvdEfSgc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fDzvdEfSgc
- eric_h 13y agoThanks for the link to that. "Free drift trickery", indeed.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- bane 13y agoYou know, thinking over https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7617720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7617720 I almost wonder why Musk hasn't set an interim step to Mars that involves space habitats. Right now SpaceX is probably the closest to making an economy based on http://www.bigelowaerospace.com/ http://www.bigelowaerospace.com/ and http://www.planetaryresources.com/ http://www.planetaryresources.com/ working. If they get the 1st stage reusable it brings the bootstrap costs down significantly.
- rm445 13y agoIt's not clear that it's an interim step exactly. Mars has gravity, earth for radiation shielding and some resources to work with. I don't know exactly what SpaceX have in mind for a Mars mission, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't a variant on 'Mars Direct'.
- pearjuice 13y agoI am skeptical of SpaceX its future endeavours. They proved they are on par with government subsidized space programmes, but haven't done anything astonishing yet. I mean, they probably bought a majority of the tech from NASA or the Soviets and just made it work. Not that it isn't impressive, just that an actual own in-house rocket would have been more ground breaking.
- lutorm 13y agoan actual own in-house rocket would have been more ground breaking Huh? As Wikipedia says: "In order to control quality and costs, SpaceX designs, tests and fabricates the majority of its components in-house ..."
- bane 13y agoTheir rocket designs are in house -- unlike competitors (like Orbital or Lockheed Martin who use refurbed Soviet Era engines). The vast majority of SpaceX's equipment is designed, built and tested all in house.
- avmich 13y agoRD-180 was designed in 1990-s, after break-up of USSR, and you can't just saw in half RD-170 to get RD-180. "Refurbished" usually applies to something used for some time already - not to the rocket engines, certainly not to RD-180 and NK-33, which apart from being fire-tested weren't used in flight.
- bane 13y agoYou're right about the RD-180, I think those are still produced? I think Orbital also has used the NK-33 and NK-43, which were all built in the 60s and 70s. Refurbished can also just mean "something that was sitting around for a long time and needed to maintenance to get up to working". Anything that sits around for 40 years is going to need some kind of work done on it before it's put in service. Either way, SpaceX doesn't use them.
- ghshephard 13y ago
- vermontdevil 13y agoThey also tested the new replacement to grasshopper called Falcon 9R Dev http://youtu.be/0UjWqQPWmsY http://youtu.be/0UjWqQPWmsY
- throwawaymsft 13y agoCongrats to the SpaceX team, always inspiring. The correction made in the article (5000 tons => 5000 lbs) shows the importance of having mental visualizations for basic numerical concepts. 5000 lbs of cargo is about an SUV. I can imagine a rocket carrying that up. 5000 tons of cargo is... a giant Wal-mart parking lot full of SUVs (2000 of them). Stacked, they'd make a tower of metal a few miles high. (How? Figure 6 feet tall x 2000 = 12000+ feet.) Can you imagine a rocket carrying that up and dropping it off at the space station? Nope. When numbers are just symbols, mistakes like this are easy to make.
- est 13y ago> Can you imagine a rocket carrying that up and dropping it off at the space station? Nope. Yes! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ia2N4vpaEo&t=284 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ia2N4vpaEo&t=284
- grinich 13y agoI was hoping this thread would have a KSP link ;)
- mikeash 13y agoI tutored physics for a while in college, and I always tried to emphasize this sort of sanity check. It was always amusing when a student would crank through the calculations, make a mistake somewhere, and come up with the answer that their hypothetical frictionless roller coaster was fourteen light years tall, and not even realize that the number that came out was clearly wrong.
- asafira 13y agoI stress this, too, when I privately tutor. One interesting problem (albeit not directly relevant problem) that came up was "How would you determine the average radius of a hair given the number of hairs on your head?". This actually wasn't obvious to me, but my student figured it out right away! Put your hair in a pony tail, and measure the diameter of the ponytail, figure out that area, and divide by the number of hairs. Brilliant!
- jokoon 13y agoany video of the landing of the 1st stage, which is not a test ? or is spacex still using expendable stages ?
- wolf550e 13y agoThe Falcon 9 is still expendable. They plan to recover the first stage this year and re-fly a stage next year.
- kanwisher 13y ago9. Nf