A few days ago Russia's Deputy Prime Minister said NASA should use a trampoline to get astronauts to ISS. To which Elon Musk tweeted: "Sounds like this might be a good time to unveil the new Dragon Mk 2 spaceship that @SpaceX has been working on w @NASA. No trampoline needed" Then he followed that with: "Cover drops on May 29. Actual flight design hardware of crew Dragon, not a mockup." So maybe NASA's closer to using SpaceX for crew transfer after all. patrick On 18 Apr 2014, at 16:38, Wiggins Patrick <paw@getbeehive.net> wrote:
Following today's successful launch of another Falcon 9 to the ISS I went to the SpaceX Falcon 9 webpage (http://www.spacex.com/falcon9) and saw no mention of today's launch but did see this:
FALCON 9 & DRAGON TO RETURN ASTRONAUTS TO SPACE
There was a link to a very nice video about Falcon 9 but it contained no mention of astronauts.
Now wouldn't it be fun if after docking with ISS and they open the hatch Elon Musk were to float out...?
patrick
On 29 Mar 2014, at 15:16, Wiggins Patrick <paw@getbeehive.net> wrote:
Regarding getting our folks to ISS, we already have that capability but I don't know that a very risk adverse NASA is ready to use it yet.
SpaceX has made at least three cargo carrying trips to and from ISS using their Falcon 9. And Falcon 9 was designed to carry people. After the first flight SpaceX's founder said that had someone stowed aboard on the flight they would have been fine.
So who knows, maybe current events will spur NASA and SpaceX to declare Falcon 9 to be human rated sooner than planned.
And regarding Joe's point, NPR's On the Media aired a segment today on the problem the Crimea situation is causing for map makers. Find the 15 minute podcast here:
http://www.onthemedia.org/story/crisis-cartographic-proportions
'Course if we start down the road of giving land back to people it was taken away from in the last century I'm sure the Palestinians will want in on that conversation.
patrick
On 29 Mar 2014, at 10:30, Joe Bauman <josephmbauman@yahoo.com> wrote:
I agree with Eric re. Crimea. It was part of Russia until Khrushchev "gave" it to Ukraine administratively, back when they were both in the USSR.
------------------------------ On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 10:08 AM MDT Erik Hansen wrote:
Sounds like we are on schedule to have our own spacecraft for that. It was a mistake not have a replacement for the shuttle, instead we got the overly ambitious and costly Orion. I do have a hard time getting worked up over Crimea, true it probably was not 90% of the population that voted for it but nobody disputes that E Ukraine and Crimea consist of mostly ethnic Russians.
With the situation in Crimea/Ukraine I'm starting to wonder how much longer we are going to be able send replacement astronauts to the ISS. It's looking pretty dicey. I think we are still several years away from any new private (or government) manned launch capability to orbit.
I hope we don't end up with a repeat of Skylab.
Clear skies, Dale.