SpaceX - News Items

Looks like there is going to be a bit of a delay visiting the ISS

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/17 ... iss_delay/

The Feb. 7th flight has been postponed:

1st Private Rocket Launch to Space Station Delayed.
by Denise Chow, SPACE.com Staff Writer
Date: 16 January 2012 Time: 01:51 PM ET
http://www.space.com/14251-launch-delay ... light.html


The Russians and some members of NASA were uncertain about SpaceX's ability to perform the linkup with the ISS successfully. For a $100 billion asset, that is an understandable concern.

A couple of suggestions. First hire away from the Russians some top guys involved with the Progress cargo vehicle to the ISS and from the Europeans some top guys involved with the ESA's Automated Transfer Vehicle(ATV). For the billion dollar cargo supply contract SpaceX has with NASA, it can afford to do that.

Secondly, prior to the ISS docking mission do some rendezvous missions in space with the Dragon spacecraft. Ideally it would be with a vehicle that it could actually dock with. The Progress M-13M cargo vehicle for instance is scheduled to undock from the ISS in a few days. According to the Wikipedia page the undocking is scheduled for the 25th:

Progress M-13M.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_M-13M

while on this NASA release it's listed as on the 23rd:

NASA ISS On-Orbit Status 19 January 2012.
Source: NASA HQ
Posted Thursday, January 19, 2012
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=39635

The release of a small Russian satellite from the Progress and the de-orbit burn for the Progress is scheduled to occur a day later. Could the undocking or least the de-orbit burn be postponed for enough time for SpaceX to launch the Dragon to be able link up with the Progress vehicle?

In any case, the current plan is not for Dragon to perform the final link-up with ISS under its own power and navigation capabilities but just to get close enough for the robot arm to grapple it and pull it to the station to dock with it. So for this, all the Dragon has to do is demonstrate the ability to get close enough to some orbiting satellite without colliding with it to within a similar distance is it would be to the ISS. It might be able to do this several times with different satellites to further demonstrate this capability.


Bob Clark

So the COTS 2/3 demo has been postponed, but that doesn't mean Spacex is doing nothing in between. They have just added a first video showing testfirings of the SuperDraco engine (used for the LES and future propulsive landing):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUUnYgo1-lI

They say


edit: and here is the press release:
http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=20120201

Quite unexpectedly:

http://space.brevardtimes.com/2012/02/s ... arsal.html



Also a picture of F9/Dragon assembly vertical on pad:

Another update from SpaceX. Lots of stuff from them recently.

The 60minutes stuff is well worth watching. Seems that Elon Musk is quite upset at the lack of support from some of the Apollo astronauts.

thought he was going to cry!!

He really looked like he was going was going to cry, but it is also quite a slap in the face when Neel Armstrong dislikes the the hole concept of SpaceX.

On the other hand there's Buzz Aldrin who, as far as I remember, supports commercial space industry.

http://thoughteconomics.blogspot.com/20 ... ation.html

And if you ask me, Armstrong might have been the first to walk on the Moon, but Aldrin always seemed to be the more sensible one.

As far as I remember Armstrong is a pilot, while Aldrin has a degree from MIT in some form of engineering, so i totally agree, but still Armstrong's support would have been nice. Also hes (as well as anyone else's) arguments against commercial space are, as far as i can tell, based on ignorance rather than information. :-S

Armstrong seems to be stuck in the 1960's NASA Cold War glory days paradigm to me. It's a classic case of Clarke's First Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." It's up to the younger generations to ignore them, push on, and prove them wrong, thus furthering progress...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... eneur.html

The first commercial round-trips to Mars will blast off within 10 years, according to PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, CEO of U.S commercial rocket maker SpaceX.
The trip will cost a cool $500,000 (£300,000) - entirely payable through PayPal, no doubt.
In 2010, SpaceX became the first commercial company in history to launch a spacecraft into orbit and retrieve it, and has partnered with Nasa to carry out cargo deliveries to the International Space Station.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... z1pqMXAM6V

An article at Forbes about Musk

http://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahellio ... llionaire/

most of it not really SpaceX related, there's one interesting thing though.



Not sure how I feel about that.

Musk really has a lot of emotion built up in SpaceX. I'm GUESSING that even with an IPO, he will still be in charge. It's the only way he can continue to get SpaceX to do what he want it to do.