Remember when they were insisting on new-car-smell Dragons for CRS missions? Well, they’ve now approved flight-proven boosters. As I’ve long said, there will come a day when customers will demand a discount to fly on an unproven vehicle.
[Update a while later]
With today’s launch, SpaceX will double its record for annual launches.
[Update half an hour before launch]
You can follow launch and landing at the webcast.
You’ll be as shocked as I am to learn that first flight will likely slip into 2020.
Doug Messier has a critique, with which I largely agree. He does seem to be laser focused on solving the transportation problem (which was the first one he encountered when he tried to implement his initial Mars plans). I emailed him years ago about the fact that we have no idea whether or not we can conceive/gestate in 0.4g. His response was basically, “that’s not my problem right now.”
But this blinkered mindset may not ultimately serve him well in terms of his long-term goal. It would be tragic for him if he solved the transportation problem, but not the biological one, and his dreams of Mars colonies ended up being still born, despite the cost reduction of transportation there.
Media headline: “Climate Change Causing Billions Of Taxpayer Dollars In Disaster Relief.”
Accurate headline: “Cost Of Dealing With Weather Much Less Than Decarbonization.”
Coming to a smartphone near you. One-foot accuracy would be very useful in LEO (BTW, one concept I heard at the Space Settlment Summit last week was a concept for extending existing GPS to cislunar space with just a few additional birds). My question is: what velocities can it handle?
…for the Trump administration. I’ve just started to skim it.
The USAF is partially (Or totally? Who knows?) funding SpaceX to develop it.
I have no problem with this; it’s a much better use of taxpayer funds than AR1.
We have relatives visiting this coming week, and are doing things to clean up and organize the house that we’ve been putting off for months/years. Meanwhile, go see how pathetically Tom Stafford is stuck in the 60s. #Apolloism
I was at the Space Settlement Summit all day yesterday, and will be all day today as well, with a non-functioning laptop. I will be tweeting occasionally from my phone, however, and I’ll probably have some overall thoughts on the event tomorrow.
NASA has confirmed the existence of another “moon” around earth. It’s a captured asteroid (and this happens occasionally). This seems like a very near-earth object. I wonder what its composition is?