NASA launches astronauts on Space X rocket.

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NASA launches astronauts on Space X rocket.

Post by The Romulan Republic »

Not sure if this is more News or Science, but it seemed worthy of notice. This makes Space X the first private company to launch people into orbit- something previously accomplished only by the governments of the Soviet Union/Russia, the United States, and China. It also means that, after 11 years, the US will no longer rely on writing checks to Vladimir Putin to launch its astronauts into space- now we'll be writing them to Elon Musk.

https://cbc.ca/news/technology/spacex-r ... -1.5591728
A rocket ship built by Elon Musk's SpaceX company thundered away from Earth with two Americans on Saturday, ushering in a new era in commercial space travel and putting the U.S. back in the business of launching astronauts into orbit from U.S. soil for the first time in nearly a decade.

NASA's Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken rode skyward aboard a white-and-black, bullet-shaped Dragon capsule on top of a Falcon 9 rocket, lifting off at 3:22 p.m. local time from the same launch pad used to send Apollo crews to the moon a half-century ago. Minutes later, they slipped safely into orbit.

"Let's light this candle," Hurley said just before ignition, borrowing the words used by Alan Shepard on America's first human spaceflight, in 1961.

The two men are scheduled to arrive at the International Space Station, 400 kilometres above Earth, on Sunday for a stay of up to four months, after which they will come home with a Right Stuff-style splashdown at sea.

The mission unfolded amid the gloom of the coronavirus outbreak, which has killed over 100,000 Americans, and racial unrest across the U.S. over the death of George Floyd, a handcuffed black man, at the hands of Minneapolis police.

NASA officials and others held out hope the flight would would be a morale-booster.

"Maybe there's an opportunity here for America to maybe pause and look up and see a bright, shining moment of hope at what the future looks like, that the United States of America can do extraordinary things even in difficult times," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said before launch.

1st private company in orbit
With the on-time liftoff by the 80-metres rocket, SpaceX, founded by Musk, the Tesla electric-car visionary, became the first private company to launch people into orbit, a feat achieved previously by only three governments: the U.S., Russia and China.

The flight also ended a nine-year launch drought for NASA, the longest such hiatus in its history. Ever since it retired the space shuttle in 2011, NASA has relied on Russian spaceships launched from Kazakhstan to take U.S. astronauts to and from the space station.

In the intervening years, NASA outsourced the job of designing and building its next generation of spaceships to SpaceX and Boeing, awarding them $7 billion US in contracts in a public-private partnership aimed at driving down costs and spurring innovation. Boeing's spaceship, the Starliner capsule, is not expected to fly astronauts until early 2021.

Musk said earlier in the week that the project is aimed at "reigniting the dream of space and getting people fired up about the future."

Ultimately, NASA hopes to rely in part on its commercial partners as it works to send astronauts back to the moon in the next few years, and on to Mars in the 2030s.

A launch attempt on Wednesday was called off with less than 17 minutes to go in the countdown because of lightning. On Saturday, stormy weather in Florida threatened another postponement for most of the day, but then the skies began to clear in the afternoon just in time.

'It's been way too long'
Before setting out for the launch pad in a gull-wing Tesla SUV — another Musk product — Behnken pantomimed a hug of his six-year-old son, Theo, and said: "Are you going to listen to Mommy and make her life easy?" Hurley blew kisses to his 10-year-old son and wife.

Nine minutes after liftoff, the rocket's first-stage booster landed, as designed, on a barge a few hundred miles off the Florida coast, to be reused on another flight.

"Thanks for the great ride to space," Hurley told SpaceX ground control. His crewmate batted around a sparkly purplish toy, demonstrating that they had reached zero gravity.

SpaceX controllers at Hawthorne, Calif., cheered and applauded wildly. Bridenstine pronounced it "just an amazing day."

"It's been nine years since we've launched American astronauts on American rockets from American soil — and now it's done. We have done it. It's been way too long," he said.

President Donald Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence flew in for the launch attempt for the second time in four days.

"I'm so proud of the people at NASA, all the people that worked together, public and private. When you see a sight like that it's incredible," Trump said after liftoff.

Inside Kennedy Space Center, attendance was strictly limited because of the coronavirus, and the small crowd of a few thousand was a shadow of what it would have been without the threat of COVID-19. By NASA's count, over 3 million viewers tuned in online.

Despite NASA's insistence that the public stay safe by staying home, spectators gathered along beaches and roads hours in advance.

Canada's Bob and Doug take off — eh! — on social media with SpaceX rocket launch
Historic launch of SpaceX rocket delayed over bad weather
Among them was Neil Wight, a machinist from Buffalo who staked out a view of the launch pad from a park in Titusville.

"It's pretty historically significant in my book, and a lot of other people's books. With everything that's going on in this country right now, it's important that we do things extraordinary in life," Wight said. "We've been bombarded with doom and gloom for the last six, eight weeks, whatever it is, and this is awesome. It brings a lot of people together."

Veteran astronauts
Because of the coronavirus, the astronauts were kept in quasi-quarantine for more than two months before liftoff. The SpaceX technicians who helped them get into their spacesuits wore masks and gloves that made them look like black-clad ninjas. And at the launch centre, the SpaceX controllers wore masks and were seated far apart.

Hurley, a 53-year-old retired Marine, and Behnken, 49, an Air Force colonel, are veterans of two space shuttle flights each. Hurley piloted the shuttle on the last launch of astronauts from Kennedy, on July 8, 2011.

In keeping with Musk's penchant for futuristic flash, the astronauts wore angular white uniforms with black trim. Instead of the usual multitude of dials, knobs and switches, the Dragon capsule has three large touchscreens.

SpaceX has been launching cargo capsules to the space station since 2012. In preparation for Saturday's flight, SpaceX sent up a Dragon capsule with only a test dummy aboard last year, and it docked smoothly at the orbiting outpost on autopilot, then returned to Earth in a splashdown.

During the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and shuttle programs, NASA relied on aerospace contractors to build spacecraft according to the agency's designs. NASA owned and operated the ships.

Under the new, 21st-century partnership, aerospace companies design, build, own and operate the spaceships, and NASA is essentially a paying customer on a list that could eventually include non-government researchers, artists and tourists. (Tom Cruise has already expressed interest.)

"What Elon Musk has done for the American space program is he has brought vision and inspiration that we hadn't had" since the shuttle's retirement, Bridenstine said.

The mission is technically considered by SpaceX and NASA to be a test flight. The next SpaceX voyage to the space station, set for the end of August, will have a full, four-person crew: three Americans and one Japanese.

Saturday's first human flight was originally targeted for around 2015. But the project encountered bureaucratic delays and technical setbacks.

A SpaceX capsule exploded on the test stand last year. Boeing's first Starliner capsule ended up in the wrong orbit during an crew-less test flight in December and was nearly destroyed at the mission's end.
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Re: NASA launches astronauts on Space X rocket.

Post by Jub »

Say what you like about Elon Musk as a person. SpaceX has been a smashing success and space flight is advancing rapidly because of them and other such private space ventures.
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Re: NASA launches astronauts on Space X rocket.

Post by TimothyC »

The Romulan Republic wrote: 2020-05-30 07:37pm Not sure if this is more News or Science, but it seemed worthy of notice. This makes Space X the first private company to launch people into orbit- something previously accomplished only by the governments of the Soviet Union/Russia, the United States, and China. It also means that, after 11 years, the US will no longer rely on writing checks to Vladimir Putin to launch its astronauts into space- now we'll be writing them to Elon Musk.
To be fair, the US has never flown a crew vehicle* that wasn't built by a contractor (all of whom are now owned by Boeing). The relationships between NASA and the various contractors are complex and often incestuous. An example of this is that The current NASA Acting Associate Administrator for the Human Exploration Operations Mission Directorate (the guy that makes the final call for all US missions to the station, and crew missions in general) is Ken Bowersox. From 2009 through 2011 He was the VP for Astronaut Safety and Mission Assurance at SpaceX (mind you, they didn't go to the station in that time).

As for the "NASA launches astronauts" it's not quite correct. SpaceX launched the Astronauts, and NASA didn't take over control until the Dragon capsule Endeavour reached the ISS keep-out zone. That's the difference between This and say, A shuttle launch. "SpaceX launches astronauts to ISS for NASA" would be a more accurate title.

Also, as much as I don't like Musk, I'd rather the money go to SpaceX than to Roscosmos.

*The X-38 Assured Crew Return Vehicle program test articles were built in-house at NASA Johnson, and V-201, which was to be the orbital return test vehicle reached 90% complete when it was cancelled without replacement in 2002 as a part of slimming down the US contribution to the station.
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Re: NASA launches astronauts on Space X rocket.

Post by MKSheppard »

TimothyC wrote: 2020-05-31 12:34pmAlso, as much as I don't like Musk, I'd rather the money go to SpaceX than to Roscosmos.
What I don't get is why the US Government is funding fully expendable rockets like Vulcan (Vulcan Centaur is getting up to $1.2B in public funds), especially when ULA will only parachute the engines back, and not for another half-decade after Vulcan flies.

Meanwhile...

Image

Hell, even RocketLab is going to capture their entire rocket via parachute and are testing that now.

Link
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Re: NASA launches astronauts on Space X rocket.

Post by TimothyC »

MKSheppard wrote: 2020-05-31 01:15pmWhat I don't get is why the US Government is funding fully expendable rockets like Vulcan (Vulcan Centaur is getting up to $1.2B in public funds), especially when ULA will only parachute the engines back, and not for another half-decade after Vulcan flies.
ULA has never had a mission fail to reach a point where a customer considered it a success.

SpaceX on the other hand....

Image

USAF/USSF have gotten used to having two (mostly) dissimilar rockets for space access. Vulcan is going to be able to provide that, while retaining ULA's 100% reliability in hitting their targets.
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Re: NASA launches astronauts on Space X rocket.

Post by Adam Reynolds »

TimothyC wrote: 2020-05-31 02:22pm ULA has never had a mission fail to reach a point where a customer considered it a success.

SpaceX on the other hand....
As I understand it, the issue is that SpaceX is trying to find all of the places they can cut corners and make things cheaper, while ULA goes for the safer and more conservative(and thus vastly more expensive) approach. I'm not sure if SpaceX is working to make manned missions safer, so the risk of failure and crew death is certainly there.

For unmanned launches, the cost difference with ULA vs SpaceX is such that SpaceX plus the insurance policy is still generally cheaper than ULA for everything but the most expensive payloads.
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Re: NASA launches astronauts on Space X rocket.

Post by Lord Revan »

Adam Reynolds wrote: 2020-05-31 05:33pm
TimothyC wrote: 2020-05-31 02:22pm ULA has never had a mission fail to reach a point where a customer considered it a success.

SpaceX on the other hand....
As I understand it, the issue is that SpaceX is trying to find all of the places they can cut corners and make things cheaper, while ULA goes for the safer and more conservative(and thus vastly more expensive) approach. I'm not sure if SpaceX is working to make manned missions safer, so the risk of failure and crew death is certainly there.

For unmanned launches, the cost difference with ULA vs SpaceX is such that SpaceX plus the insurance policy is still generally cheaper than ULA for everything but the most expensive payloads.
Well the risk of crew death is always there it's something you can't really remove, that said being more careful there will signigantly reduce the risk. That said I suspect Space X would stil try to make the manned missions as failure free as possible as having a manned rocket explode on the launch platform is much worse of a PR disaster then having an unmanned rocket explode and bad PR would cost them money and no company wants that.
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Re: NASA launches astronauts on Space X rocket.

Post by The Romulan Republic »

A manned flight ending in loss of life likely means a multi-year freeze in launches while the causes are investigated and improvements are made, and that will cost them enormously.
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Re: NASA launches astronauts on Space X rocket.

Post by A-Wing_Slash »

The Romulan Republic wrote: 2020-06-01 06:38am A manned flight ending in loss of life likely means a multi-year freeze in launches while the causes are investigated and improvements are made, and that will cost them enormously.
Judging by Musk's performance on Twitter, there's a good chance that risk is not being as heavily weighted in SpaceX's preparations as one might assume.
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Re: NASA launches astronauts on Space X rocket.

Post by Sky Captain »

And we have succesful splashdown. Looks like despite all the concerns and previous setbacks demo mission went according to plan. Let's hope future crew flights goes as smooth as this one and Boeing also sorts out bugs in their capsule.
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Re: NASA launches astronauts on Space X rocket.

Post by John Done »

The Romulan Republic wrote: 2020-05-30 07:37pm Not sure if this is more News or Science, but it seemed worthy of notice. This makes Space X the first private company to launch people into orbit- something previously accomplished only by the governments of the Soviet Union/Russia, the United States, and China. It also means that, after 11 years, the US will no longer rely on writing checks to Vladimir Putin to launch its astronauts into space- now we'll be writing them to Elon Musk.

https://cbc.ca/news/technology/spacex-r ... -1.5591728
A rocket ship built by Elon Musk's SpaceX company thundered away from Earth with two Americans on Saturday, ushering in a new era in commercial space travel and putting the U.S. back in the business of launching astronauts into orbit from U.S. soil for the first time in nearly a decade.

NASA's Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken rode skyward aboard a white-and-black, bullet-shaped Dragon capsule on top of a Falcon 9 rocket, lifting off at 3:22 p.m. local time from the same launch pad used to send Apollo crews to the moon a half-century ago. Minutes later, they slipped safely into orbit.

"Let's light this candle," Hurley said just before ignition, borrowing the words used by Alan Shepard on America's first human spaceflight, in 1961.

The two men are scheduled to arrive at the International Space Station, 400 kilometres above Earth, on Sunday for a stay of up to four months, after which they will come home with a Right Stuff-style splashdown at sea.

The mission unfolded amid the gloom of the coronavirus outbreak, which has killed over 100,000 Americans, and racial unrest across the U.S. over the death of George Floyd, a handcuffed black man, at the hands of Minneapolis police.

NASA officials and others held out hope the flight would would be a morale-booster.

"Maybe there's an opportunity here for America to maybe pause and look up and see a bright, shining moment of hope at what the future looks like, that the United States of America can do extraordinary things even in difficult times," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said before launch.

1st private company in orbit
With the on-time liftoff by the 80-metres rocket, SpaceX, founded by Musk, the Tesla electric-car visionary, became the first private company to launch people into orbit, a feat achieved previously by only three governments: the U.S., Russia and China.

The flight also ended a nine-year launch drought for NASA, the longest such hiatus in its history. Ever since it retired the space shuttle in 2011, NASA has relied on Russian spaceships launched from Kazakhstan to take U.S. astronauts to and from the space station.

In the intervening years, NASA outsourced the job of designing and building its next generation of spaceships to SpaceX and Boeing, awarding them $7 billion US in contracts in a public-private partnership aimed at driving down costs and spurring innovation. Boeing's spaceship, the Starliner capsule, is not expected to fly astronauts until early 2021.

Musk said earlier in the week that the project is aimed at "reigniting the dream of space and getting people fired up about the future."

Ultimately, NASA hopes to rely in part on its commercial partners as it works to send astronauts back to the moon in the next few years, and on to Mars in the 2030s.

A launch attempt on Wednesday was called off with less than 17 minutes to go in the countdown because of lightning. On Saturday, stormy weather in Florida threatened another postponement for most of the day, but then the skies began to clear in the afternoon just in time.

'It's been way too long'
Before setting out for the launch pad in a gull-wing Tesla SUV — another Musk product — Behnken pantomimed a hug of his six-year-old son, Theo, and said: "Are you going to listen to Mommy and make her life easy?" Hurley blew kisses to his 10-year-old son and wife.

Nine minutes after liftoff, the rocket's first-stage booster landed, as designed, on a barge a few hundred miles off the Florida coast, to be reused on another flight.

"Thanks for the great ride to space," Hurley told SpaceX ground control. His crewmate batted around a sparkly purplish toy, demonstrating that they had reached zero gravity.

SpaceX controllers at Hawthorne, Calif., cheered and applauded wildly. Bridenstine pronounced it "just an amazing day."

"It's been nine years since we've launched American astronauts on American rockets from American soil — and now it's done. We have done it. It's been way too long," he said.

President Donald Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence flew in for the launch attempt for the second time in four days.

"I'm so proud of the people at NASA, all the people that worked together, public and private. When you see a sight like that it's incredible," Trump said after liftoff.

Inside Kennedy Space Center, attendance was strictly limited because of the coronavirus, and the small crowd of a few thousand was a shadow of what it would have been without the threat of COVID-19. By NASA's count, over 3 million viewers tuned in online.

Despite NASA's insistence that the public stay safe by staying home, spectators gathered along beaches and roads hours in advance.

Canada's Bob and Doug take off — eh! — on social media with SpaceX rocket launch
Historic launch of SpaceX rocket delayed over bad weather
Among them was Neil Wight, a machinist from Buffalo who staked out a view of the launch pad from a park in Titusville.

"It's pretty historically significant in my book, and a lot of other people's books. With everything that's going on in this country right now, it's important that we do things extraordinary in life," Wight said. "We've been bombarded with doom and gloom for the last six, eight weeks, whatever it is, and this is awesome. It brings a lot of people together."

Veteran astronauts
Because of the coronavirus, the astronauts were kept in quasi-quarantine for more than two months before liftoff. The SpaceX technicians who helped them get into their spacesuits wore masks and gloves that made them look like black-clad ninjas. And at the launch centre, the SpaceX controllers wore masks and were seated far apart.

Hurley, a 53-year-old retired Marine, and Behnken, 49, an Air Force colonel, are veterans of two space shuttle flights each. Hurley piloted the shuttle on the last launch of astronauts from Kennedy, on July 8, 2011.

In keeping with Musk's penchant for futuristic flash, the astronauts wore angular white uniforms with black trim. Instead of the usual multitude of dials, knobs and switches, the Dragon capsule has three large touchscreens.

SpaceX has been launching cargo capsules to the space station since 2012. In preparation for Saturday's flight, SpaceX sent up a Dragon capsule with only a test dummy aboard last year, and it docked smoothly at the orbiting outpost on autopilot, then returned to Earth in a splashdown.

During the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and shuttle programs, NASA relied on aerospace contractors to build spacecraft according to the agency's designs. NASA owned and operated the ships.

Under the new, 21st-century partnership, aerospace companies design, build, own and operate the spaceships, and NASA is essentially a paying customer on a list that could eventually include non-government researchers, artists and tourists. (Tom Cruise has already expressed interest.)

"What Elon Musk has done for the American space program is he has brought vision and inspiration that we hadn't had" since the shuttle's retirement, Bridenstine said.

The mission is technically considered by SpaceX and NASA to be a test flight. The next SpaceX voyage to the space station, set for the end of August, will have a full, four-person crew: three Americans and one Japanese.

Saturday's first human flight was originally targeted for around 2015. But the project encountered bureaucratic delays and technical setbacks.

A SpaceX capsule exploded on the test stand last year. Boeing's first Starliner capsule ended up in the wrong orbit during an crew-less test flight in December and was nearly destroyed at the mission's end.
I guess it doesn't matter whom to write checks in order to send astronauts to ISS. They will still have to write those checks someone.
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Re: NASA launches astronauts on Space X rocket.

Post by John Done »

NASA has set a new date for ISS Crew-1, also known as US Crew Vehicle 1 (USCV-1), the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket with Crew Dragon (C207 Resilience), which will mark the transition to full operation of SpaceX, is scheduled for November 14th.
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Re: NASA launches astronauts on Space X rocket.

Post by TommyJ »

All launches have already passed. How do you like the green flame?
PR move? Why aren't the rest of the space companies filming their flaws to promote discussions?
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