SpaceX Dragon

[Salo]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p6EruPdoXY&feature=player_embedded

[Salo]

Убрали иллюминатор и добавили "уши" для СБ на багажник (trunk)

[Salo]

Вот сукин сын:
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/tracking/index.html

April 12     Falcon 9  •  Dragon C3

[Петр Зайцев]

Вот сукин сын:
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/tracking/index.html

April 12     Falcon 9  •  Dragon C3

Не, это не считается. Во-первых, дата не круглая, а во-вторых, экипажа нет.

[Ну-и-ну]

В случае успеха С2/3 (удетел-долетел вовремя и без больших глюков) пьянка-праздники-отпуска, оценка результатов, работа над ошибками и традиционное восстановление старта займёт время. К апрелю, полагаю, не успеть.

[Salo]

Чтобы выполнить три пуска по CRS в 2012 году самое-то. Плюс Cassiope  для MDA.

[ronatu]

ELON MUSK: Oh, thanks for having me back.

FLATOW: Tell us about the Dragon spacecraft. How big is it?

MUSK: Well, it's about 13 feet in diameter and a little - maybe 15 feet tall, and it has - it does have sort of a capsule, a gumdrop shape. It's capable of carrying seven astronauts - same as the shuttle - and up to six tons of cargo to the space station.

FLATOW: Wow. And you - it is working so well that your flight schedule got upgraded?

MUSK: Yeah. We've been able to advance the schedule and combine the next two test flights into one. So the current plan of action is to dock with the space station in December.

FLATOW: And so the launch - you don't have a specific launch date. You just have a launch window in December.

MUSK: Well, we have a nominal launch date, which is actually November 30th, and then it'll - we'll do a series of maneuvers in orbit. The Dragon is a robotic spacecraft, so there's no one onboard. It's doing all this automatically. So we're going to go up there, conduct a series of maneuvers, essentially virtually dock with a virtual space station. If that looks good, then we'll go and dock with the real thing.

FLATOW: Mm-hmm. And how much money does this save NASA over launching its own?

MUSK: Well, we're about a tenth of the cost of the space shuttle per flight. However, the space shuttle is a bigger vehicle, but we carry the same number of people as the space shuttle, and there's no longer a need to carry space station modules up there as there was in the past. So this is - you know, it's an order of magnitude improvement in NASA's ability to get to the space station with cargo and then, in a few years, with astronauts. And so we're really happy to be doing this in partnership with NASA.

FLATOW: Do you think NASA will allow you to carry astronauts?

MUSK: Oh, yeah. No, absolutely.

[Кенгуру]

По поводу этого видео:

У них дверь парашютного отсека привязана к стропам? Потому, что она улетает куда-то в небо вместе с парашютом, а потом вниз вроде нигде не падает. Или я не заметил?

А у Союза также?

[DAP]

Следующий полет Дракона к МКС (COTS 2/3) переползает, возможно, на конец января 2012. Интересно, что если бы он состоялся 30 ноября, то экипаж всего в трех человек (включая только одного американца) не был бы основанием для переноса сроков, так как оказывается, что русские члены экспедиции проходили обучение на захват дракона манипулятором на станции.

the SpaceX combined COTS 2/3 demo mission, currently planned for 30th November, may slip to late January 2012.

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2011/08/iss-managers-flight-manifest-following-progress-failure/

[LG]

Следующий полет Дракона к МКС (COTS 2/3) переползает, возможно, на конец января 2012. Интересно, что если бы он состоялся 30 ноября, то экипаж всего в трех человек (включая только одного американца) не был бы основанием для переноса сроков, так как оказывается, что русские члены экспедиции проходили обучение на захват дракона манипулятором на станции.

the SpaceX combined COTS 2/3 demo mission, currently planned for 30th November, may slip to late January 2012.

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2011/08/iss-managers-flight-manifest-following-progress-failure/

Это что - сюжетдля ОХУМОРы?

[Dude]

логично, по-идее в результате тренировок им уже без разницы что "хватать".

[Salo]

http://spacerefpress.com/sq/issues/SpaceQuarterly-2011V1N1-USD.pdf

SpaceX — Vision vs the Market[/size]

In an era fraught with so many uncertainties comes a company that could change the world, in time.

By Marc Boucher

SPACE EXPLORATION TECHNOLOGIES, MORE COMMONLY known as SpaceX, is unlike any other rocket and spacecra& company that exists today. In it's nine years of existence, it has only launched a total of seven rockets and yet its competitors, including China, fear them. But it wasn't always that way, and its future success is far from certain.
SpaceX is a New Generation rocket and spacecra& company, one of a very few in a market whose heritage is not born of the defense program. In fact, "SpaceX was founded with the long-term goal of enabling humanity to become a space-faring civilization" according to their mission statement. It is this goal and the vision that its driven founder, Elon Musk has, which separates it from its competitors and which could propel it into a force that changes the world.
Musk and SpaceX are not the first to startup with such a grandiose goal, but they are the first to successfully fly a rocket, the Falcon, and their own spacecraft, Dragon, and to do it cheaper than anyone in the market. !is is not a result to take lightly. !e market globally has noticed.
The road to its current, but limited success, has not been easy. But it has been smoother than other rocket programs that preceded it.
SpaceX is built "on the shoulders of giants", said Musk a&er its last launch on December 8th of 2010. On that day, a Falcon 9 rocket lofted the Dragon spacecraft to safely orbit the Earth twice before a successful water landing and recovery.
Built on giants indeed.
When Musk decided in mid-2002 to start SpaceX, he did so after spending a year doing research. Modern rocket history goes back 80 odd years before Musk started his venture, and in those years, many countries had tested tens of rocket variants. Most were built primarily for their defense programs. For Musk, this was a great legacy upon which to base his ideas.
Musk was not trained as a rocket scientist. In fact, his professional career revolved around software and Internet technologies. This proved to be an asset, as at the time Musk had been working in the high pressure, fast paced changing Internet world in Silicon Valley. To truly succeed in that world, which was booming in the late 1990's, you needed not only to create a viable business model and execute it, you had to constantly innovate. It's that notion of innovation, along with his obvious other skills, that Musk brought with him when he founded SpaceX.
Part of Musk's research included a trip to Russia to learn more about the Russian space program and to learn what they would charge to launch a payload to Mars. His experience in Russia proved to be an eye opener and was ultimately the catalyst that led him to start SpaceX.
Once the idea of SpaceX came to maturation, he decided he would seek out the best talent in the industry. And in an industry that eats cash quickly and is slow to deliver profits, he would need a lot of cash to get him through the first few years. Fortunately for Musk, after selling his first two companies for a combined $1.5 billion, he was in a position to bankroll the start of SpaceX. So Musk invested $100 million of his own money into the company during the early years. Along the way he also received approximately $80 million from venture capitalists and at one point, took out a $30 million loan.
With the funds available, it was time to hire the right mix of talent that would build SpaceX from the ground up. Inevitably, some of the first hires didn't quite see eye to eye with Musk's leadership style and quietly left. While Musk listens to the people he's hired, ultimately he makes the big decisions. Some of those who've been there since the beginning, or were hired within the first year and now hold executive level positions include Gwynne Shotwell, now President, Tim Buzza, Hans Koenigsmann, Tom Mueller, Robert Reagan, Branden Spikes, and Chris Thompson to name a few. Most of these people were veterans
of the industry coming from companies such as Boeing, TRW, The Aerospace Corporation, McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing). They had worked on programs such as the Delta II, III, IV, Titan IV, the International Space Station and the list goes on. So while Musk gets much of the media attention, it's this core of highly skilled people that has been there almost from day one, that works well together and that has helped put SpaceX on the map.
Now, if your mission statement is to enable humanity to become a space-faring civilization, then you're thinking BIG PICTURE. But to make this vision happen, you need to start small. And this is exactly what Musk did. But he did it in a way that opened up the market to SpaceX before a single rocket had been built. It turns out marketing is one of Musk's and SpaceX's great strengths.
For SpaceX to succeed in this market, which was, and still is, dependant on government support and contracts, it would need to do something to not only compete, but to get people's attention. From the beginning, Musk said one of his objectives was to cut the cost of a launch by 1/10th of current standards. !is was not only ambitious, it garnered a few snickers from many industry insiders and still does.
Musk's first rocket, initially known as the Falcon and then later the Falcon 1, was a small rocket to which Musk said he would charge $6 million per flight to orbit. This was 1/3rd the price of competitors in the same class. While this made news in 2003, just 9 months after SpaceX had been founded, it still wasn't being taken seriously within the industry.
The only way SpaceX was going to be taken seriously was to actually build a rocket, successfully fly it and do it cheaper than anyone else. After all, that was the promise, to do it cheaper.
Unfortunately, there would be the inevitable delays and setbacks which ultimately pushed back the first Falcon 1 launch to March of 2006, nearly four years after the company had started. And that launch was a failure. History is littered with failures of new rockets, so although it was disappointing that the #rst Falcon 1 launch failed, it was not wholly unexpected and certainly would not deter Musk or SpaceX.
Although SpaceX claimed a partial success in their next attempt a year later, within the industry it was still considered a failure. But for SpaceX, patience was supreme and with each launch came new knowledge and lessons learned. More than a year would pass before the next launch attempt and once again it was a failure. By now, the summer of 2008, six years a&er its founding, SpaceX still hadn't delivered on its promise. Whispers could be heard of people losing faith.
But the reality was SpaceX was learning, adopting, innovating after each failure. Less than two months after its latest failure SpaceX was ready to try again. This time, success!
The fourth flight of Falcon 1, Flight 4 was the turning point. The date was September 28th, 2008. Within the next two years SpaceX would launch another Falcon 1 and it's newer, larger variant, the Falcon 9, both successfully.
While success was sweet on that early fall day, previous failures had come at a price.
Early on in its development, SpaceX had wanted to base its launches out of Vandenberg Air Force Base in California not too far north from it's headquarters in Los Angeles. It had signed an agreement with the Air Force to develop and use Space Launch Complex 3 West (SLC-3W). One of the first launches scheduled there was for the Air Force experimental satellite TacSat-1.
Scheduled to launch in 2004, TacSat-1 never flew. After continual delays, the Air Force abandoned the launch as it had met its needs with the launch of TacSat-2 in December 2006 by SpaceX competitor Orbital Sciences.
To make matters worse, it turned out that the adjacent pad, Space Launch Complex 3 East (SLC-3E) was going to be used frequently by United Launch Alliance (ULA), another SpaceX competitor, for Atlas V launches of military payloads. Due to a launch restriction, SpaceX found itself abandoning SLC-3W and Vandenberg altogether. The restriction that scuttled SpaceX's original Vandenberg launch site was that while a launch
vehicle was sitting on the pad at SLC-3E waiting for launch, no launch could happen at SLC-3W. And since a launch vehicle could sit for months on the pad at a time it made no sense for SpaceX to continue using SLC-3E.
With Vandenberg out the picture for the time being, SpaceX moved its launches to the Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific where eventually all Falcon 1 launches took place. Launching out of Kwajalein wasn't ideal, but
with years of delays SpaceX's options were limited for launch sites.
Even before the first Falcon 1 had launched, SpaceX had plans for a larger variant, the Falcon 5. that variant was quickly shelved for the next variant, the Falcon 9, a more capable vehicle with 9 Merlin engines on its first stage. And in November 2007 SpaceX broke ground on Space Launch Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station adjacent to the NASA's Kennedy Space Center where the Falcon 9 would be launched. Less than a year after the second Falcon 1 successfully launched and two and half years after ground breaking, the first
Falcon 9 launched in June of 2010 and was successful. In December of 2010, the next launch of the Falcon 9 successfully carried the Dragon spacecraft into orbit. The frustrations of the first six years were long gone
now. In two and half years SpaceX had gone from its third Falcon 1 failure in a row to having four successful launches in a row for two different rockets and one new spacecraft. If the market hadn't been paying attention before, they certainly were now.
History has lessons to teach, and it seems Musk took those to heart. It may have taken SpaceX six years to successfully launch a rocket but it learned from its mistakes. Not only did it learn from its mistakes but it had learned from all those who had preceded it. And being nencumbered by too much government red tape as a private company, Musk could basically build the company the way he wanted to as long as the funds were there.
Being a private company is the only way SpaceX could have achieved what it has in the time it did. !e company needed focus, leadership and a vision. All of which it's proven it has in abundance.
In its nine years of existence, SpaceX has spent $800 million through the end of 2010 in developing Falcon 1, Falcon 9 the Dragon spacecraft and all of their facilities, which is substantial. It has designed and built all the hardware and so&ware itself. It has flown seven rockets of which the last four have been successful. It has orbited a spacecraft designed for cargo and human spaceflight.
In comparison to another private startup, Blue Origin, founded in 2000 by Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos, two years before SpaceX, has yet to fly a rocket or spacecraft to orbit. Blue Origin is a very secretive company but with little to show publicly, it's safe to say it is years behind SpaceX.
Another comparison worth making is with NASA's now defunct Constellation Program. !e program was born from the Vision for Space Exploration released by President Bush in February 2004.
!e program was to see the development of Orion, a crew capsule to carry astronauts, Altair a lunar lander and the Ares launcher. The program was estimated to cost $97 billion if it had continued through 2020. The first products of the program were to have been Orion and Ares. In fact, considerable work was done in both programs and NASA did launch a test vehicle, the Ares-1X on a 2 minute test flight in October of 2009. The test however came a month after the Government Accountability Office (GAO) had released a report titled "Constellation Program Cost and Schedule Will Remain Uncertain Until a Sound Business Case Is Established". In the report, the GAO said that development of Ares 1 and Orion represented $49 billion of the $97 billion estimated for the program through 2020 and that NASA was already obligated to spend $10 billion in contracts. In February 2010, President Obama effectively killed the program by not funding it in the next budget. In June of this year, NASA oficially terminated the program. While Constellation is dead, the Orion capsule was reborn as the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle. As for the launcher Ares, congress has directed NASA to build something bigger, much bigger, a Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle under the new program name Space Launch System. To date, NASA has not released how it will proceed with this Congress mandated program.
NASA spent over $10 billion over seven years to develop what was the Constellation Program. Other than one short rocket test, it had no hardware ready to fly, whether it's a capsule or rocket at the time of the
programs termination.
It should be noted that NASA did invest in an alternate launch system and crew capsule. Through the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Program, NASA invested in several commercial companies to help fund development of their efforts to provide cargo services to NASA for the International Space Station (ISS). As well, NASA funded the Commercial Crew Development program. This program is to help commercial companies in their development of commercial crew access to the ISS. Ironically enough, NASA has granted $300 million from those programs to SpaceX.
So of the $800 million SpaceX has spent through 2010, $300 million came from NASA. I'd say NASA has spent that money wisely, considering the progress SpaceX has made.
Although I only offered two comparisons, the point is that at this stage in its development, SpaceX is a well run, successful organization accomplishing tasks others with money have not been capable of doing.
And in comparison to NASA, doing it real cheap. SpaceX couldn't afford to spend the kind of money NASA did.
The comparison to NASA does make me wonder what SpaceX could accomplish if it had been given the resources NASA had for the Constellation Program.
The future for SpaceX looks good but it is far from certain. While it's launch manifest is growing, and is considerable at over 40 pending launches, it still has competitors to deal with. And unlike the early days when SpaceX wasn't taken seriously, now they most certainly are. Their competitors are learning and adopting, albeit slowly. If their competitors don't adopt, they'll be left behind, consigned to the history books.
With the good times comes good news. Earlier this year, SpaceX announced it would be returning to Vandenberg, this time it would use Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) and wouldn't have to worry about the previous restriction that plagued SLC-3W. SpaceX broke ground on the new complex in July and is expected to launch its first vehicle from there in early 2013. Instead of launching Falcon 1 from Vandenberg, SpaceX will now be launching its new entry into the heavy lift launch market, the Falcon Heavy. And what a beast it is. The Falcon Heavy will be able to launch 53 metric tons to Low Earth Orbit, more than twice the payload of its' nearest competitor. And this for an advertised price of between $80 and $125 million, which is cheaper than anyone else.
Pricing is the foundation of SpaceX's future success. If they can continue to reduce the cost per launch, then not only will they dominate the market but they will open up access to space to more government and commercial ventures. Of course, that's the whole point. SpaceX doesn't exist as a government jobs program. Nor does it exist to make its owners rich. SpaceX exists to help humanity and to make it a space-faring civilization. That's the vision. !at's what competitors have to deal with.
The question is, can it dominate the market?
SpaceX is a growing company. It has more than 1500 employees now. Can the innovations that got it to this point continue as it grows? Musk thinks so. He said "SpaceX intends to make far more dramatic reductions in price in the long term when full launch vehicle reusability is achieved. We will not be satisfied with our progress until we have achieved this long sought goal of the space industry." Vehicle reusability is one of those innovations SpaceX has yet to conquer and which it feels it must to bring down launch costs by a factor of ten as once promised. !e quote was part of a statement Musk made in May of this year in response to Chinese officials who said that China could not compete with SpaceX's low prices.
Another issue for SpaceX to deal with is going public. SpaceX will have to go public once it reaches the 500 shareholder mark. It would have done so already but with the market the way it's been the last few years, this has been put on hold. Musk told Space Quarterly that should the market stabilize and be "in decent shape", then in late 2012 the company might be ready to go public. SpaceX has to go public at some point because all employees receive stock options. Going public has its pluses and minuses. On the plus side, it means an influx of cash to help the company grow even further. On the minus side comes pressure to deliver results sooner, the added overhead of filings and more complicated tax preparation but more importantly the focus of the company, the singular vision can be slowly eroded through public influence. However it's hard to see Musk relinquishing control of SpaceX or having the vision change. One way to go public and keep voting control, thus controlling the direction of the company, is if SpaceX offers dual-class shares. With dual-class shares there is one class for anyone who wants to buy shares and another with super voting rights.
Another potential problem for SpaceX going forward is patents.
The patent system in the U.S. is broken and is badly in need of repair, but that doesn't appear to be something the government plans on fixing anytime soon. Musk told Space Quarterly that if he had his way, SpaceX wouldn't file patent applications. The reason is simple, it would provide a blueprint of some of SpaceX's innovations that could be copied by foreign competitors who ignore the patent laws. Having said that, Musk did say SpaceX has filed a few patent applications and would file more in the future in response to another commercial space company who is filing patent applications for "obvious things", thus taking advantage of a broken patent system.
SpaceX has leveraged every little advantage it could along the way. Getting NASA funding to help further development of its program has helped. The third round of funding for the Commercial Crew Development program is expected to be announced in the fall.
No doubt SpaceX will be one the applicants. However with massive budget deficits, and a Congress that can't seem to get anything done, there is no guarantee the program will go forward. And of course there is no guarantee SpaceX will win funding should the next round go forward. If it doesn't it, might slow down development of SpaceX's Dragon program but it will go forward with it nonetheless.
Currently SpaceX has eight Dragons under development and NASA has agreed to combine its second and third demo flights into one resulting in an expected November 30th launch of Falcon 9 with a Dragon spacecraft onboard and a rendezvous with the ISS in early December. It's also considering expanding its launch locations to include a strictly commercial launch facility, though no location has been selected yet.
SpaceX has grown from an idea in 2002 to a company that must be reckoned with and one which could dominate the sector. That's quite an accomplishment for a nine year old company in a tough business. And while its vision and its business acumen have gotten it this far, SpaceX has a long way to go before it reaches its ultimate goal: making humanity a space-faring civilization. !e market is there. Can it grow it, hold it, enable it further?[/size]

[Oleg]

Всё! Вот оно счастье. Все  космические фирмы могут отдыхать, а нервные пусть покурят в сторонке. Скоро "мускусный волшебник" :lol: все сделает за них.
53 т на LEO почти даром и людей на Марс в 2018 г.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/08/01/spacex-founder-on-how-to-get-to-mars/

[Bizonich]

August 15, 2011

Over the last several months, SpaceX has been hard at work preparing for our next flight — a mission designed to demonstrate that a privately-developed space transportation system can deliver cargo to and from the International Space Station (ISS). NASA has given us a Nov. 30, 2011 launch date, which should be followed nine days later by Dragon berthing at the ISS.

NASA has agreed in principle to allow SpaceX to combine all of the tests and demonstration activities that we originally proposed as two separate missions (COTS Demo 2 and COTS Demo 3) into a single mission. Furthermore, SpaceX plans to carry additional payloads aboard the Falcon 9's second stage which will deploy after Dragon separates and is well on its way to the ISS. NASA will grant formal approval for the combined COTS missions pending resolution of any potential risks associated with these secondary payloads. Our team continues to work closely with NASA to resolve all questions and concerns.

This next mission represents a huge milestone not only for SpaceX, but also for NASA and the US space program. When the astronauts stationed on the ISS open the hatch and enter the Dragon spacecraft for the first time, it will mark the beginning of a new era in space travel.

Through continued private-public partnerships like the one that helped develop the Falcon 9 and Dragon system, commercial companies will transform the way we access space. Together, government and the private sector can simultaneously increase the reliability, safety and frequency of space travel, while greatly reducing the costs.

The update below highlights our recent progress towards the combined C2/C3 mission and missions beyond. From the 1,500 team members here at SpaceX, thank you for your continued support, and for joining us in this exciting, vital adventure.

Похоже второй и третий полеты могут состоятся и в этом году. В конце концов численность работников спейсХ выросло до полутора тысяч.

[Потусторонний]

там написано что второй и третий полеты объединены в один

[Bell]

В конце концов численность работников спейсХ выросло до полутора тысяч.

Нельзя убить дракона...

[Bizonich]

В конце концов численность работников спейсХ выросло до полутора тысяч.

Нельзя убить дракона...

Ага, нападая на сотрудника SpaceX сам становишся таким. Интересно получится у них сроки соблюсти или нет? Маск так и хотел, совместить третий испытательный со вторым. Значит уговорил таки НАСА. Я думал что уже и не полетит в этом году.

[Salo]

Может и не полететь, если к концу ноября станция будет летать в беспилотном режиме.

[Дмитрий Виницкий]

Возможен и обратный вариант - МКС законсервируют, если сабж не полетит. и Маску это на руку.

[Потусторонний]

Возможен и обратный вариант - МКС законсервируют, если сабж не полетит. и Маску это на руку.

Вот это круто! сабж это Дракон? Может прямо сейчас объявить эвакуацию? :lol: