totm nov 2023 SpaceX Discussion Thread

[Nuke]

3 minutes ago, tater said:

?

it was irt this:

25 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I mean, thank god for them having an alternative way to come back dirtside alive but more months of diapers and being an unplanned guest?

 

[tater]

39 minutes ago, Nuke said:

it was irt this:

 

Ah. Yeah, the only time anyone wears diapers on ISS is EVA. They are using the toilet like everyone else.

[Ultimate Steve]

A dedicated dragon mission just to return the Starliner isn't really feasible.

Endeavor is currently in space for crew 8.

Resilience is prepared for Polaris Dawn and has all of the EVA modifications and currently has the cupola in place of a docking port. It would be possible to modify it back and do a specialty mission but Jared and crew would probably have to wait the better part of a year to fly.

Freedom is going to fly Crew 9. Using this for a rescue flight would mean Crew 9 gets pushed back a few months, and either Crew 8 stays up there for a year (Dragon may not be rated for that) or the ISS crew goes down to 3 and relies entirely on Soyuz until Crew 9.

Endurance is slated for Fram2. It has only been back since March and isn't scheduled to go up until an ambiguous "Q4" date. It probably isn't ready and will probably also use the cupola. This would also make the customers somewhat unhappy.

C213 is set to fly in Februart for crew 10 and will not be ready in time.

Sure, they could possibly get Resilience or Endurance ready for a rescue if needed, but why bother with a very expensive mission that involves delaying someone else and having to add yet another spacecraft to the ISS parking schedule  when the problem can be solved by keeping 2 people in space for 8 months and bumping 2 astronauts to a later flight?

Seems like the solution of least resistance as it is minimal ground work for minimal cost and only seriously inconveniences four people.

 

Like basically SpaceX can indeed throw around a Falcon with a few days notice. I don't believe they can, or plan to be able to do the same with Crew Dragon. They aren't rapidly reusable and I believe require significant refurbishment. There are only four (soon to be five) of them and at any given time one of them is probably in space, and the rest of them are spoken for to various degrees.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

1 hour ago, Ultimate Steve said:

basically

That, folks, is a solid answer. 

Gracias Esteban Ultimo

[tater]

 

[tater]

 

[CatastrophicFailure]

22 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

That, folks, is a solid answer. 

Gracias Esteban Ultimo

Also worth noting that until the, er, riff-raff has boogered off, both docking ports remain full and Dragon cannot be berthed like the old Cargo Dragon. Also Butch & Suni aren’t exactly overstaying their welcome, they’ve been quite busy up there doing crazy astronaut stuff and since NASA is, actually, a rather capable and forward-looking organization, they’ve been previously trained on all matters of working on the ISS, experiments, even EVAs if necessary, so both they and NASA are getting their moneys’ worth, as it were, from the extended stay. (The taxpayers re:riff-raff are another matter)

IIRC the two contingency plans are thus: Crew 8 Dragon is currently being modified with crew couches on the cargo pallets, this would be B&S’s ride home in an emergency once SL gets its “recall” so it can undock autonomously. Crew 9 will launch with only two astronauts, and extra IVA suits, and then B&S will officially become part of that mission and return in February. 

If there were some life-threatening emergency right now, they probably would just return on SL. 

23 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:

Like basically SpaceX can indeed throw around a Falcon with a few days notice. I don't believe they can, or plan to be able to do the same with Crew Dragon. They aren't rapidly reusable and I believe require significant refurbishment. There are only four (soon to be five) of them and at any given time one of them is probably in space, and the rest of them are spoken for to various degrees.

I think that, at great and extreme need, they probably could, simply because they really do have the resources just “lying by the side of the road.”

[magnemoe]

22 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Also worth noting that until the, er, riff-raff has boogered off, both docking ports remain full and Dragon cannot be berthed like the old Cargo Dragon. Also Butch & Suni aren’t exactly overstaying their welcome, they’ve been quite busy up there doing crazy astronaut stuff and since NASA is, actually, a rather capable and forward-looking organization, they’ve been previously trained on all matters of working on the ISS, experiments, even EVAs if necessary, so both they and NASA are getting their moneys’ worth, as it were, from the extended stay. (The taxpayers re:riff-raff are another matter)

IIRC the two contingency plans are thus: Crew 8 Dragon is currently being modified with crew couches on the cargo pallets, this would be B&S’s ride home in an emergency once SL gets its “recall” so it can undock autonomously. Crew 9 will launch with only two astronauts, and extra IVA suits, and then B&S will officially become part of that mission and return in February. 

If there were some life-threatening emergency right now, they probably would just return on SL. 

I think that, at great and extreme need, they probably could, simply because they really do have the resources just “lying by the side of the road.”

It makes sense, you don't want juniors flying an new capsule. And as I understand an issue with IIS is that its actually understaffed as most of the crew time is keeping the station running. 
One of the reason NASA want to buy in on an commercial station so they don't have to do ship and hotel jobs most of the time. 
They would share the running cost with companies and tourists, And its fun to use billionaires as interns, fun for both parts  

And the falcon 9 launch tempo let you insert other payloads if needed, excrements our satellite stopped working and customers are screaming. Yes we can delay an starlink launch. 
Dragons is the bottleneck for manned missions.

 

[Pthigrivi]

Can someone explain to me why sending 4 relatively inexperienced guinea pigs up there to fly through the van allen belt and test out suits with no airlock isn't kinda nuts? It's always worried me that spaceX might start taking the same kind of cavalier attitude toward human lives that they have with hardware. 

[AckSed]

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

Can someone explain to me why sending 4 relatively inexperienced guinea pigs up there to fly through the van Allen belt and test out suits with no airlock isn't kinda nuts? It's always worried me that SpaceX might start taking the same kind of cavalier attitude toward human lives that they have with hardware. 

Arguably, Isaacman isn't inexperienced. He's commanded previous Polaris missions and is by most measures a legitimate astronaut, despite not being NASA-trained.

Scott Poteet is a newbie to spaceflight, but a certified USAF fighter pilot.

Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis are 'just' SpaceX engineers, it's true, but engineers responsible for building operating the Dragon capsule.

The whole crew has spent 2,000 hours and two and a half years in simulators training for this.

The final test before flight got the go-ahead was vacuum-testing the suits in a vacuum chamber, where they caught and fixed a potential issue with static.

And finally, Bill Gerstenmaier is the vice-president of Build and Flight Reliability at SpaceX. You may not recognise the name, but he had another job before this: chief of human spaceflight at NASA for 16 years. He is also extremely boring.

SpaceNews summarises these details and more from the livestream here: https://spacenews.com/polaris-dawn-private-astronaut-mission-ready-for-launch/

Is it risky? Yes, very much so. Spaceflight is not safe.

Edited August 25 by AckSed

[tater]

5 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Can someone explain to me why sending 4 relatively inexperienced guinea pigs up there to fly through the van allen belt and test out suits with no airlock isn't kinda nuts? It's always worried me that spaceX might start taking the same kind of cavalier attitude toward human lives that they have with hardware. 

They don't have a cavalier attitude towards hardware at all when it matters.

The point of the NASA Commercial Crew program was to get vehicles to service NASA's ISS needs in terms of crew delivery, AND to facilitate commercial spaceflight for non-NASA astronauts/passengers to LEO as a secondary goal. NASA wanted to kickstart commercial human spaceflight.

[tater]

Maybe they change the schedule, maybe weather intervenes, but right now SpaceX has 3 Falcon 9 launches tomorrow night in a span of 81 minutes.

[RCgothic]

11 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

...to fly through the van allen belt and test out suits with no airlock isn't kinda nuts?

Whilst you wouldn't want to stay in the Van Allen belts, this isn't anything humans haven't done before. It'd take just under two months of exposure to the worst bits to accumulate a fatal dose with shielding of 3mm aluminium (25sv/year).

Dragons are considerably better shielded than this, the trajectory will avoid the worst areas, and they aren't going to be staying there for months. A few orbits only. 

Apollo and Gemini both transited the belts with no ill effects to astronauts. Apollo doses were dominated by solar particles outside earth's magnetic field. 

I think it's awesome people are going beyond LEO for the first time since Apollo.

[tater]

Still showing a triple-header tonight, too.

[tater]

They moved the other 2 launches to tomorrow night it seems.

[Codraroll]

7 hours ago, tater said:

Still showing a triple-header tonight, too.

So by next year, they would be doing as many orbital launches in a week as Russia does in a year. Hopefully more.

[tater]

All three launches tonight slip to tomorrow. I assume the non-Polaris Dawn 2 will slip a day as well? Or maybe they keep the VSFB one?

[tater]

Currently 2 launches tonight, with the other moved to tomorrow night.

[DAL59]

On 8/24/2024 at 12:29 PM, Minmus Taster said:

Very interesting look, like a steampunk airship sliced in half, is it a V2 Starship?

Probably known to you all by now but:

 

So the first mission is the first civilian EVA, the second the first crewed polar orbit, do we know what's special about the third?

[Ultimate Steve]

8 minutes ago, DAL59 said:

So the first mission is the first civilian EVA, the second the first crewed polar orbit, do we know what's special about the third?

I think you're confusing Polaris 2 with Fram2. Fram2 is gonna be first polar orbit. We don't know much about Polaris 2. Rumor has it that it was gonna be the hubble servicing mission but that's in limbo. Polaris 3 is going to be the first crewed launch of starship.

[tater]

Polaris Dawn scrubbed due to bad weather in recovery zone, next try Aug 30.

(capsule recovery, in case of abort)

[CBase]

 

however payload is fine

 

but SpaceX is surprised as well and is investigating

 

[darthgently]

2 hours ago, CBase said:

 

however payload is fine

 

but SpaceX is surprised as well and is investigating

 

To date, there have been 267 ... 0 consecutive successful Falcon 9 landings.  Oh well, onward and upward.

As of August 28, 2024, SpaceX had achieved **267 consecutive successful Falcon booster landings** before a booster, B1062, unfortunately toppled over on the Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship (ASOG) after completing its 23rd mission. This streak highlights the remarkable reliability and reusability advancements of the Falcon 9 rocket.

Edited August 28 by darthgently

[AckSed]

If they want to drum up funds, I want to think they could sell keychains made from the toppled boosters.

[Superpluto126]

4 hours ago, darthgently said:

To date, there have been 267 ... 0 consecutive successful Falcon 9 landings.  Oh well, onward and upward.

As of August 28, 2024, SpaceX had achieved **267 consecutive successful Falcon booster landings** before a booster, B1062, unfortunately toppled over on the Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship (ASOG) after completing its 23rd mission. This streak highlights the remarkable reliability and reusability advancements of the Falcon 9 rocket.

B1062? That was my favourite Falcon 9 Booster