SpaceX/ISS fly-under, coverage starts at 11:30 pm PDT

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/ustream.html

by DavidSJ • 14 years ago

56 58 14 years ago

nasa.gov

jonah4• 14 years ago

First burn now scheduled for around 1:00 am PDT, second burn (for 2.5 km approach) at 1:43 am PDT.

damncabbage• 14 years ago

Friday 6:30am UTC, with first burn at 8am and then second at 8:43am.

(That's Friday 4:30pm, 6pm and 6:43pm for Sydney-siders. :D )

ColinWright6• 14 years ago

Do you mean Thursday?

johnchristopher• 14 years ago

I wished worldwide events were announced with local time and some unique universal time the whole world would agree on (gmt ? umt? utc? sw@tch ?) that could easily be converted once you know your location's offset. It would make my life easier.

edit:

man date

date -u

jeudi 24 mai 2012, 11:00:31 (UTC+0000)

TZ='America/Los_Angeles' date

jeudi 24 mai 2012, 04:00:55 (UTC-0700)

date --date='TZ="America/Los_Angeles" 11:30pm'

vendredi 25 mai 2012, 08:30 (UTC+0200)

Might be handy to keep that under my belt for future references. Of course events reported or announced at the time they are happening are going to throw me off by a day.

sparknlaunch12• 14 years ago

Looks like those guys in mission control are having a blast. One guy appeared to be sleeping.

Slightly unrelated but underneath the video it has a live counter of views.

"1159 current / 944428 total views"

DavidSJ• 14 years ago

I was hanging on the edge of my seat after Mission Control requested of the ISS cosmonaut to restart his Outlook.

sasha-dv2• 14 years ago

So did I.

But, I think, doing dangerous stunts like that is just a small part of their daily duties.

Mizza• 14 years ago

All the NASA guys are wearing ties and all the SpaceX guys are wearing black t-shirts and jeans. Interpret as you will.

mukaiji• 14 years ago

I thought the exact same thing! Also, one of the spacex guy in the front is in flip-flops.

jonah4• 14 years ago

Although there's a magic 8 ball on the CATO desk at the ISS control center. ;)

Oh, and a baseball bat on the ADCO desk.

fidotron• 14 years ago

It is quite amusing that you can see the NASA bureaucracy by comparison. Things like the printers, choice of desk systems . . .

InclinedPlane4• 14 years ago

Ya know, that could be as simple as East coast vs. West coast office attire.

Lambdanaut• 14 years ago

Anecdotally as somebody sitting on the east coast in a start-up's office right now, everyone in this room is wearing a t-shirt with jeans/shorts. I see some flip flops peeking out here and there too.

I think it's more of a Start-up vs. Corporate office attire. SpaceX's culture is more Fresh Silicon Valley Startup than it is corporate.

And of course there is a huge concentration of Start-ups on the west coast.

kristofferR2• 14 years ago

Here's a low-def link for people on sucky connections. The HD stream didn't exactly work very well here in Cambodia.

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-mobile

kristopher• 14 years ago

Countdown Timer via TimeAndDate.com:

http://www.timeanddate.com/counters/customcounter.html?msg=S...

bostonvaulter2• 14 years ago

Thanks for that, converting time-zones is a huge pain.

kristofferR2• 14 years ago

http://www.worldtimebuddy.com/ makes it quite easy.

rplnt3• 14 years ago

So it did already happen? Or there are more of them, or what? Because from what I hear it still sounds like they are preparing for it.

ColinWright6• 14 years ago

See elsewhere, but ...

They've done the correction burn to put them in the same orbit, but 2.4 lower than the ISS. They will undertake in an hour or so from now, passing between the ISS and the Earth.

When some distance ahead they will burn again and rise into a slower orbit and let the ISS undertake them, thus dropping behind. Finally, they will go back down to a holding point, and wait till tomorrow while they check all the data.

Tomorrow they do a similarly detailed set of moves, ending up a hundred metres away, when they will be captured by the robotic arm, and docked.

See the image on this page:

http://nssphoenix.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/spacex-dragon-fli...

http://nssphoenix.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/638592main_03_...

jonah4• 14 years ago

NASA has paid SpaceX $381mm to date for the 37 of 40 tasks in the COTS program.

So, private industry, yes, but a lot of public assistance in achieving this.

[edit]: Not bashing the arrangement at all. Just pointing out the deep history and current support, both technical and financial.

sasha-dv2• 14 years ago

The NASA's decision to support SpaceX with money and expertise is a step in the right direction.

NASA (and Roscosmos) should delegate to private companies all of the operations in LEO. They should focus their efforts on sending humans deeper into space.

I want to see a day when docking at the ISS is considered a boring affair.

lucian1900• 14 years ago

I agree, except about sending humans deeper into space. It seems much cheaper and more useful to send many, many machines deeper into space.

marvin3• 14 years ago

Do these $381MM include launch costs?

fleitz2• 14 years ago

Yup, that's all in, the total contract is $1.5 billion for 12 missions.

lchengify• 14 years ago

A single shuttle mission used to cost ~450MM per mission [1]. By comparison this is a bargain.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Budget

InclinedPlane4• 14 years ago

There are 3 relevant costs for a single Shuttle mission.

There is the incremental cost. How much it would take to squeeze in another Shuttle mission in a given year, if possible. That cost was around $450 million in the last two decades or so of the Shuttle program. This is a useful cost estimate if you need to decide how much it's going to cost to launch or not launch a single Shuttle mission, for example, but doesn't actually give you a sense of how much it costs to operate the Shuttle overall. As an analogy, if you have a car and you want to decide whether you can hop in and make a long drive to a nearby city the cost that is relevant to you just then is the cost of just the gas to get there. However, the actual cost to you should take into account maintenance, insurance, oil changes, parking, car washes, tires, etc.

So, there is also the overall "operational cost" per flight, which takes into account all of the cost of the fixed overhead (Shuttle personnel, mission control, etc.) for the Shuttle program. In the latter years of the program this cost was around $1 billion per flight, though it fluctuated from year to year based on flight rate. There were a few years where NASA still spent billions of dollars on the Shuttles and yet no flights were happening (after Challenger and Columbia), for example. This is probably the fairest measurement of Shuttle costs since it tells you how much it costs to keep the Shuttle program going.

Finally, there is the total cost to the tax payers of the entire Shuttle program from development through the last flight, divided by the total number of flights. This is about $1.5 billion per launch. It's the best "what if we'd done something else instead of build the Shuttle" cost estimate and gives us a sense of the opportunity cost of STS but it's not entirely the best cost for deciding whether to keep the program running (since it includes sunk costs that shouldn't affect future decision making).

By any measure the Shuttle was far and away the most expensive launch vehicle to be used so frequently.

ricardobeat• 14 years ago

The whole private industry thing is not about who's funding it right now, but the business model. SpaceX is not completely under NASA's wings, they have their own goals and schedule. They sell services to NASA (and others), and a future where most of their revenue doesn't come from government contracts isn't that far.

MPSimmons• 14 years ago

Would you build a business that didn't have customers?

You don't say that the business is weaker because the customers are paying it money. That's called success.

picklefish2• 14 years ago

Could someone explain the steps until docking? What exactly is the fly under / first burn / second burn?

marvin3• 14 years ago

Today, SpaceX is just testing/demonstrating to NASA that the Dragon capsule is, in fact, capable of performing the precise navigation required to dock with the ISS. So the diagram they keep showing on NASA TV is the scheduled "test track" which will take the capsule around the space station. Additional and more precise maneuvers will be tested tomorrow before the docking takes place.

Due to the vaccuum of space, firing the rocket engines (a "burn") is required for any change in direction (the effects of gravity nonwithstanding). The burns we are looking at right now are to move the Dragon capsule closer to the ISS in the vertical dimension: First one burn to accellerate it upwards towards the ISS, and then a second burn to level it off and stop moving upwards. It will still have its _horizontal_ velocity relative to the space station after the second burn.

picklefish2• 14 years ago

Exactly what I wanted to know. Much appreciated.

sneak2• 14 years ago

It's been a minute since I've watched NASA TV. Do you think they have enough US flags on the desks there in Mission Control?

I'm a fan of American industry and the private sector, but man does that sort of overt ueber-patriotic nationalism give me the willies.

Maybe it's because I live in Berlin and it's pretty obvious what becomes of countries in the period right after that becomes widespread. Ugh.

fleitz2• 14 years ago

Hopefully the US doesn't start bringing back the flag salute, it is interesting how both regimes borrow heavily from roman symbolism.

jonah4• 14 years ago

Who knows, they may represent the nationality of the staff member. I don't think it's too bad, there aren't huge flags hanging from the walls.

evride• 14 years ago

I wouldn't fear any uber-patriotic nationalism from them just because they have flags on their desk. HR probably just hands them out with the name plates to everyone when they're hired.

My mother works for a city government office and they handed out those flags for birthdays last year. She wasn't happy about it at all.

What it's a sign of is some Chinese company making a lot of money off cheap trinkets.

sneak2• 14 years ago

No, it's symptomatic of a growing and powerful trend in thinking and attitudes of the members of the US Government.

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1779544,00....

Mithrandir2• 14 years ago

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/SSapplication...

^ Tells you when you can view the ISS outside. I guess sky-viewing isn't as detailed as the webcast, but it's still pretty cool.

obilgic• 14 years ago

Lady@NASA is continuously eating something.

phoboslab2• 14 years ago

It's weird how much time they spend with copying (talking) numbers back and forth over a crappy voice connection. Wouldn't a simple text chat (IRC maybe) make this way more efficient and less error prone?

rplnt3• 14 years ago

You can't type with your hands full :)

ColinWright6• 14 years ago

Typing in weightless conditions is tricky, and when you're also performing a task, talking is way, way easier. The back-and-forth is a formal protocol designed to minimise (prevent!) errors, and the rate of communication is rarely the limiting factor, and for many, speaking, even with the repetitions, is faster than typing.

Especially in micro-gravity.

With your hands full.

phoboslab2• 14 years ago

Interesting. It never occurred to me that typing with your hands floating around may not be as easy as on earth.

I was just watching as one crew member was calibrating a camera, probably by using a laptop(?), and he had to repeat a number 3 times till ground copied correctly. I just thought "damn, he could just copy and paste these numbers into a chat session". But then again, why aren't these numbers transmitted automatically in the first place?

ColinWright6• 14 years ago

Dragon module spotted by the ISS cameras.

Stunning.

marvin3• 14 years ago

http://imgur.com/If7Ze

Mithrandir2• 14 years ago

http://i.imgur.com/BnUKf.png

Edit: Here it is again, 1 and 1/2 miles below the ISS, http://i.imgur.com/KngeN.png

jacquesm• 14 years ago

I was watching 'The Aviator' just the other day and I realized that at some point someone will make a movie called 'the Astronaut' or something like it about Elon Musk.

If SpaceX goes public I'll buy stock. To me it will mean investing in humanity and in our collective future.

Arjuna• 14 years ago

In a 60 Minutes interview [1], Scott Pelley [2] asked Garrett Reisman [3]:

Pelley: "You know, I'm curious... you have so much background in engineering, you could have easily gotten a job at Boeing, or at Lockheed, but you came here..."

Reisman: "If you had a chance to go back in time, and work with Howard Hughes when he was creating TWA, if you had a chance to be there, at that moment, when it was the dawn of a brand new era, wouldn't you want to do that? I mean, that's why I'm here."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNwg8FvfuuU#t=425

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Pelley

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrett_Reisman

SpaceX/ISS fly-under, coverage starts at 11:30 pm PDT

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