SpaceX launching crew capsule to ISS for the 1st time in about 5 minutes!

[Crazed_Insanity]

https://www.space.com/43231-spacex-demo-1-flight-iss-explainer.html

Watch live!

[Crazed_Insanity]

Success! Flawless! Awesome! :up:

On its way to the space station now...

[Cam]

I missed this because 3 am. :lol:

[Crazed_Insanity]

Your 3am is only midnight for us. Crew capsule is on its way to dock with ISS Sunday 6am your time... I guess I’ll be missing that event because of freaking 3am our time...

[Dicknose]

Exciting... but still only a step on the path to launching a person. That will be ground breaking, for both private launch of person and the US back to capability to put a person in orbit.

[Freude am Fahren]

I went for a ride up to Ft. Pierce for the previous launch a couple weeks ago with the moon lander. There's a long stretch of the barrier island in this part of Florida with nothing but a road and beach access. So I pulled off near one and watched the launch from about 80 miles south of the launch site. Not that close, but close enough to see something.

First time I even did that. It was pitch black, since it's away from all the light pollution, but it was pretty hazy on the beach. So the first part of the launch was pretty much a big orange blur, but once it got up a ways you could see a lot more definition.

The coolest part though, was right as the first stage was ending, a giant orange moon started rising over the horizon, just under the rocket. It was awesome.

I hope to ride or drive up for future launches and actually get close.

[Dicknose]

I hope to ride or drive up for future launches and actually get close.

Im keen to see a launch - can I call shotgun for the drive?

[Crazed_Insanity]

You lucky dude! I’ve made attempts to see launches in Florida and in California, but those launches always got delayed beyond my stay... sigh...

Clear or blurry, I most look forward to ‘feeling’ the sound of those rockets. F1 or jet afterburner sounds probably are nothing compared to rockets!

Thanks to spaceX glamourizing rockets, just as what Tesla did to the EV industry, looks like commercial space travel just might become possible within our lifetime!

Btw, now that it has succeeded in docking with the station, we only need it to survive reentry and landing. I think Elon is most worried about surviving reentry... fingers crossed.

[SkylineObsession]

Yeah we nearly saw a Space X launch in Florida a couple years back, but think it got delayed to the Monday when we'd be in New York. :(

[Godson]

Man, if we launch people into space. I MUST be there.

[Phil_SS]

I've already told my wife that when they launch for Mars, I will be there. I never got to see the Apollo missions and the Saturn V. I must be there for the launch of the BFR.

[Godson]

Sounds like we have a group plan ready

[Dicknose]

Yeah I tried for a launch a couple of years ago when I was in Florida - it got delayed and I missed it!
It was a "while I was there" rather than the main reason for the trip.
But Im keen for a launch! Hopefully before a Mars launch - but definitely in for Mars as well - that will be truly epic in terms of human advancement.

[Crazed_Insanity]

Successfully splashed down back to earth. I guess we’re ready to return to space!

[retsmah]

I worked on Dragon for just my last couple months at SpaceX, that was the project that convinced me to get a new job! A lot of my friends have been working on the project for several years now, very cool that everything went well for everyone who has stuck with it. Parachute deployment and splashing down without damaging the capsule are a lot harder than I realized before working there!

[Crazed_Insanity]

Was it really just the qualification issues that made Elon scrap the vertical rocket landing on land for the capsule or were there other issues?

That was one of the coolest features which made Boeing's capsule look like a relic from the past... Now Boeing's capsule ended up with a 'leg up' by having capability for land airbag cushioned landing...

[Rare White Ape]

Retsmah if I remember correctly, you left the company just before a Falcon 9 (which was carrying a Zuckerberg satellite) was destroyed by aliens while fuelling up for a static fire test.

You had something to do with that didn’t ya? Got anything to say about it or are you gunna deny it was aliens like everyone else has?

[retsmah]

I actually left maybe 3 months after that, was there for both recent launch failures!

Eliminating land landings for dragon happened after I left, I didn't really follow what was publicly said about it. Just a quick search shows Elon claiming that they could still do it for cargo missions. It seems like it's pretty tough for people, the landing sequence would happen way faster than falcon 9, i think the engines would only fire something like five seconds before landing.

[Crazed_Insanity]

No way! From terminal velocity to 0 in 5s? If Falcon rockets can’t decelerate that fast, why should manned capsule do that? Fuel limitations perhaps?

It’d be more realistic if descending along with parachute and then 5s of rockets firing to cushion the final touchdown without the need for airbags...

Anyway, was so looking fwd to the sci-fi vertical landing of the capsule..., as it is, SpaceX is already super impressive!

[retsmah]

Yeah it's just fuel saving, you use less fuel the later/harder you stop. Falcon 9 does single engine landings when possible, but it's also forced sometimes to do landing burns with three engines if it was a heavier payload and doesn't have enough fuel left over.

I'm not sure how the math works out, but the capsule needs some amount of fuel to be able to abort, I'd imagine you want the landing burn to be as long as possible without requiring any additional fuel beyond what is required for abort.

[Rare White Ape]

Surely it would be parachute+burn just like Soyuz. I couldn’t ever imagine a scenario where a capsule was travelling at speed and relying on a last-minute (or last-five-second) suicide burn to decelerate before touchdown.

[Crazed_Insanity]

I think that was the original goal they were shooting for especially considering parachutes not being very effective on mars, but I think SpaceX changed their strategy going forward.

[retsmah]

Surely it would be parachute+burn just like Soyuz. I couldn’t ever imagine a scenario where a capsule was travelling at speed and relying on a last-minute (or last-five-second) suicide burn to decelerate before touchdown.

That was basically the plan for propulsive landing. You would do a very quick test fire of the engines at high altitude, if any of them did not perform correctly it would deploy parachutes and land in the ocean. If the brief test fire went okay then you would continue towards the landing site and do a very brief landing burn. The capsule does have 8 engines in 4 little pods of 2 engines each, I don't know exactly what the engine out capability was, I believe in theory you could lose like one engine per pod and the capsule could still land.

Anyway the advantage to this would be you land back at the launch site at the capsule can be reused quickly, you aren't like repacking parachutes and replacing explosives and all the body panels that got blown off and all that. If you do a parachute landing on land Soyuz style you are going to have to land in a desert somewhere, you aren't going to be able to target a small landing pad like the Falcon 9 currently does and Dragon was planned to.

There are also a lot of challenges with it, and it would look pretty scary, it would definitely look like it was going to hit the ground.

[Crazed_Insanity]

Folks in it won’t be able to see how fast the ground is moving towards them anyway... ;)

[Dicknose]

Maybe just jump up, just before it hits the ground!

[retsmah]

For those who haven't seen it, this was Dragon's pad abort test. The engines in this test are the same ones that would have theoretically been used to land it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_FXVjf46T8

It's got a pretty good thrust to weight ratio. Even as a person who worked there and generally had an idea of what it was going to do, I was still pretty surprised by how fast it takes off!

[Rare White Ape]

Ahh so it was meant to be a ‘schute-less propulsive landing.

Crazy.

They should’ve gone full Kerbal and used breakable struts that jut out from the capsule and decelerate it mechanically.

Though really I suppose it would never have been as violent as I’m imagining. The trip down through the atmosphere would slow it down to transonic speeds very quickly, and it would be going less than 300km/h before it reached 5km altitude. That pad abort travelled to 1km in 15 seconds after a 5 second burn, which is 240km/h.

That’s about as fast as a really fast car, but vertically!

[Godson]

Current rumors has a Human dragon launch in July... Who is down?

[Rare White Ape]

Well, everyone except the crew, who will definitely be up.

[Dicknose]

Ill see what I can do...
passport - valid
visa - valid till Nov
flights (more accurately, money to pay for flights) - back to work!!

[Godson]

I have a few friends who are interested, it's not that bad to fly down, but driving might be more flexible. We shall see.

[Freude am Fahren]

If I'm not away for work, I'll be there. It's only like 90 minutes away I think. Maybe 2 Hours.

[Phil_SS]

I may be up for this.

[retsmah]

https://twitter.com/Astronut099/status/1119825093742530560?s=19

Looks like there will be some delays, the capsule that just flew and was intended to be used for in flight abort testing exploded on a test stand yesterday!

[Crazed_Insanity]

Wow. Didn’t realize the severity of the anomaly.