SpaceX launches first totally private mission to the International Space Station A retired NASA astronaut and three space tourists are right now tucked inside a SpaceX Dragon capsule above Earth for the first-ever purely commercial mission to the International Space Station. Flames billowed from the sky as the four-person crew were carried into space by a Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from NASA's Kennedy …
What's the pool for? On Earth you need one to float and swim. In microgravity, you can just do that in the air without any worries about not breathing the water and having to dry off afterwards. Also how do you keep the water where you want it?
Now relax with a Pimms or mojito, that I understand.
1. Humans find partially-immersing themselves in warm water relaxing and pleasant.
2. Keep the water in place via centripital force: build the space station as a large-diameter ring which spins around a zero-gravity core. The outer portion of the ring is fake-gravity "down".
You are thinking of the Axiom Space Entertainment Enterprise module, which is the second module Axiom intend to attach to the ISS. Axiom's long term plan is add modules to the ISS until they have enough functionality to disconnect and become an independent commercial space station operator.
I think I must note that when I plan a vacation to Disney World, I don't account for the huge amount of money WDW Inc. has spent building the place. Nor do I account for the money spent on the road I will use to get there, or for some people the amount spent on the FAA, airports, aircraft, and other things making air travel possible.
This "totally private mission" is, I note, completely dependent on the $150bn spent by various governments on the ISS itself.
I note that the article doesn't mention the financials. In particular how much Axiom have paid for access to the ISS and for services provide by it. I expect the overnight rate is fairly high?
I believe the figure is around $10m but don't know if that is split between NASA and the other agencies. There is a breakdown somewhere, meal costs are $2k per day. Life support and toilet are around 20k per day (seems cheap). AFAIK, I don't believe Axiom have taken any supplies up with them.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/26/22250327/space-tourists-axiom-private-crew-iss-price
No mention in the article, that again Microsoft Windows apparently caused a multi-million pound delay due to the lack of codec to play output from a x265 video showing the stream from the SpaceX docking camera. The SpaceX capsule itself was working nominally. The initial solution was to attempt to install the open source software VLC Player 3.06 on a Windows PC on the ISS. The SpaceX capsule eventuallly came into range of a ground station again and they were able to relay the x265 video stream to Houston using the ground station link, to check alignment and alllow the docking to proceed.
Years ago, shuttle astronauts had a similar problem when they were looking to enjoy some downtime, and couldn't get Windows XP to play a DVD 'out of the box'. Again the problem was a lack of a DVD Player/codecs installed in the Windows setup on the ISS. They ended up giving up on the idea.
Facts are clearly not your strong point Vlad.
Crew Dragon and Cargo Dragon are two different vehicles and so are Dragon 1 and Dragon 2. The Inspiration 4 mission did not dock with the ISS so Crew Dragon has docked with the ISS six times in total, five of them manned:
Demo 1 (unmanned)
Demo 2
Crew 1
Crew 2
Inspiration 4 (did not go to ISS)
Crew 3
Axiom 1
Cargo Dragon 2 has made five flights to the ISS.
Dragon 1, which only carried cargo, flew to the ISS twenty times.
So "Dragon" has docked with the ISS 31 times, 5 of them with humans on board.
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