SpaceX joy as Space Station robo-arm grabs Dragon's tail Elon Musk's SpaceX has just made history with the first ever commercial cargoship to be captured by the International Space Station's robotic arm. ISS captures the Dragon ISS captures the Dragon. Credit: NASA TV Flying above northwestern Australia, flight engineer Don Pettit aboard the ISS reached out with the Canadarm and …
"Very good" doesn't begin to describe it. I was 12 years old when I watched Armstrong step out onto the Sea Of Tranquillity; this wasn't nearly as globally life-changing as that moment, but in its own way, it was made of awesome. Part of it, I think, is due to the fact that the Dragon capsule is designed to return safely instead of burning up, can be reused, and SpaceX already has a mananed version in the works. I'm no big flag-waver, but it's good to see someone getting close to having the USA's next generation of manned spacecraft ready to fly soon. I'm no rabid nationalist type, but after Apollo and the Shuttle, the idea that we were stuck buying rides from the Russians rankled a bit, for some reason I can't really describe.
I, too, noted the sparseness and tidiness of the SpaceX mission control room in California. I was almost disappointed after nearly a lifetime of watching the action in Houston's MCC. Never mind what a proper spaceship is supposed to look like, MCC Houston is what a Mission Control is supposed to look like -- especially back in the Apollo era; now, there was a mission control... guys smoked in that room, and cursed, and slammed down gallons of coffee, and smoked and cursed some more. Talk about your "man cave".
You betcha, man. Watched the whole thing on the NASA TV stream. It was real exciting as the Dragon approached, then got real boring for a while as they sorted out the misdirected LIDAR target reflection issue, and suddenly got exciting again. Man, was that pretty to watch. Wished I'd had some Strauss to play in the background.
Hm, good point.
Not all crackers would pose a problem, though. Soda crackers or saltines might not be so good as they're brittle and crumble easily, but Triscuits or small Wheat Thins might work.
Obviously, a non-crumbly cheese is a must. Bleu would be right out, but Brie, Camembert or a Swiss or Jarlsberg would be just right.
Can't recall if Wensleydale is a crumbly cheese or not. Iirc it's what Wallace and Gromit found on the moon, but they were able to eat it under gravity.
Damn, now I've got that old Monty Python Cheese Shop Sketch stuck in my head now (Will you shut that bloody bazuki up!)
"Dragon by the tail"? Well, kind of corny, but at least he didn't belch out some smarmy canned blabbery supplied to him by the NASA PAO... like they did every time a Shuttle docked with Mir or ISS, or every time a Shuttle landed.
Let's remember that most of the US astronauts and Russian cosmonauts are ex-test pilots, many with a heavy engineering background, so their humor tends to be a bit corn pone (guys like Pete Conrad, Charlie Duke and Dave Wolf being the exceptions that prove the rule).
To see this successful capture & berthing THEN read about the expanded SKA decision made this a very good day for space science. I really, really hope that NASA can and will now get on with doing "the big stuff" as they keep saying in their promos for this COTS test. Now SpaceX has done such a brilliant job of showing they can do the delivery runs, please get someone back onto getting us out of LEO, and lay down some nice fat pipes for the Aus/NZ section of the SKA while they're at it.
NASA mandate capture by an arm for berthing and the berthing hatch is *much* bigger than the one other vehicles dock to.
But Dragon has thrusters as well driven by state of the art (by space processor standards) computers.
Could it "berth" at this hatch *without* the arm?
Just a thought..
The Russians do it fancy and drive straight in, but by having a human in the loop you get the adaptability and ability to recognize and recover from a wider range of errors. Plus meat is on a relative scale, cheaper. So by making the docking procedure "get it in this envelope with this range of angles relative to the station, and Bob's your uncle," there is less money (even more redundant and precisely designed) and less risk associated with docking. Recall, this is how the ATV and HTV do it .
One day, these guys up there, will come back down and won’t recognise the earth they took off from. Whoever controls space – controls the world. I do wish they stop their non-sense-dream-of-Star-Trek coming to reality; all it is – is an exercise in frontier control and vying for space resources. It’s a costly practice that’s so far-removed from whats happening in our daily lives, and yet we’re supposed to cheer these madmen on!
You are as wrong as can be. See previous articles on this theme written by much cleverer people than me for all the reasons you are wrong. In brief, we need those "space-resources" yesterday, and governments have had their chance and failed us. It is so much closer to what is happening in our daily lives that I cannot believe what you wrote. Willful blindness is not attractive.
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