The Sword and Laser discussion

High fives at the Cape. The Dragon capsule will spend a day catching up to the station. It'll do a fly by on Thursday to test sensors. Docking is scheduled for Friday. Now all the cool kids will want their own rocket company
PS- "That English mapmakers formerly placed the phrase "here be dragons" at the edges of their known world has somehow become general knowledge.."

Yawn.

terpkristin wrote: "Yawn."
Well if you got up at 3 am to watch 1300 lbs. of tunafish and toilet paper being launched then no wonder your tired. ;-}
The first commercial mission probably rates a footnote in the history books but I'm not sure why NASA is happy about it.

Oddly, I work in the space industry and was actually up at 3 a.m. but I did not watch the launch (I was supporting some testing on my current satellite).

Having been involved with some human spaceflight stuff in the past, while I applaud what SpaceX has done, it's hard for me to get really excited about it. I think NASA is happy for two reasons:
1) The Falcon launch vehicle provides another US-sourced vehicle that is not solely dedicated to military missions
2) Commercializing human spaceflight potentially means the government can divert funds away from human spaceflight and back into science.

We actually had a thread on the US Space Program awhile ago, and I posted a lot of my thoughts there. I'm (generally) of the opinion that the only reason humans belong in space is to encourage humans to pay for the science that gets done. Further, studying the things that need to be studied to send humans into space for extended durations will have direct impact on technologies for dealing with existing problems on earth. For example, when you go into space, water is something you need to think of, since humans need it to live. Applying the same wastewater recycling methods used aboard the space station and in human space flight would also be extremely helpful in areas of earth where water is scarce and clean water even harder to come by. Same thing for food production, ways of treating bone density loss, etc.

That said, there are a lot of potential concerns with space tourism/sending people to space. I suppose these concerns are probably similar to those raised when commercial airlines started up but it seems like the odds even higher with spaceflight. As I said in the older thread, though, without a goal for what we want to do and a reason to do it, we can send robots and satellites up to space to do science at a significantly cheaper cost than humans (real cost and perceived cost).

And from what I've heard about SpaceX, I'll say that as one who works in the industry, I'm not all that thrilled with them. They demonstrated what we already know--that if you throw a lot of money at something and don't mind taking a loss, that you can solve a problem. The US demonstrated that in 1969. From what I've heard, though, they are not necessarily doing it in a "nice" way. I've heard that good engineers are either being burnt out or feeling like they're making compromises they don't want to make. If they quit, they're somewhat replaceable...see the previous comment about money. Granted I don't know any of that first-hand.

It will also be interesting to see what happens when/if SpaceX can't turn a profit with what they're doing. Obviously right now they're OK with taking the loss because they think they'll eventually make it make money. But what if it doesn't?

Oh, this is the old thread: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/3...

terpkristin
Thanks for the link to the old thread.
I really do wonder where we're going with out current program.
Maybe we can get the contract to resupply the new
Russian or Japanese moon bases.

Well they've docked. So I guess that wraps up this thread.
http://www.n2yo.com/
I don't see the high score listed anywhere.