Space Station grabs SpaceX Dragon ship

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18195772

by mocko • 14 years ago

585 166 14 years ago

bbc.co.uk

forza• 14 years ago

I must say I was more excited when SpaceX did their first successful launch, but this is a lot of fun for essentially being parking. Can't wait for the future though. If there's one things that sets Elon Musk apart from other entrepreneurs it's his ability to make long-term plans. It seems like everything he (and his team) does leads up to somethings even greater.

kyleslattery• 14 years ago

"essentially being parking"

I gotta say, that is one hell of a simplification—launching a rocket into space and meeting up with another craft, already in orbit, is a little more difficult that parking your car. :)

rlpb• 14 years ago

Who said anything about a car? I read that as "essentially being [orbital spacecraft] parking".

DanI-S4• 14 years ago

With any luck, in a few decades, it won't be.

camiller5• 14 years ago

I think they let the valet actually park it. ;)

someone13• 14 years ago

Official time: 9:56AM EST, and it took place over Western Australia. Congrats to SpaceX!

kayoone2• 14 years ago

Honey how was work ? - Oh nothing special, i just helped the first private company in history dock a space capsule to the international space station.

christiangenco2• 14 years ago

"That's great, could you do the dishes?"

vecinu5• 14 years ago

I think it must be quite humbling to be a part of one of humanity's accomplishments, whether it be inventing an aqueduct or traveling through space.

wtetzner• 14 years ago

Are you sure you mean humbling, and not the opposite?

gyaresu• 14 years ago

International Space Station space station. /pedantry :)

kayoone2• 14 years ago

of course you are right, fixed ;)

zecho• 14 years ago

On one hand, this is a momentous day for private space flight. On the other, we're closer to Moon lobbyists than ever.

vecinu5• 14 years ago

Privatizing area on the Moon is quite frightening to think about. I wonder if one day copyright law will also reach other planets and moons.

cglace• 14 years ago

I disagree. Privatizing the moon has been a dream of mine since I was a kid.

I like to think of it as Galt's Gulch in space.

thu• 14 years ago

With asteroid mining companies, someone will have to decide which companies can get at which asteroids.

jerf3• 14 years ago

Where humans go, human concerns will follow. The sole, singular, and only alternative is for humans not to go.

(And for those inclined to take that as their cue to strike the fashionable misanthropic pose where they claim that would be a good thing, remember: The moon is a dead, sterile rock. The Moon has no copyright law because there is no creative activity of any kind there taking place that could be copyrighted. There is nothing there to abuse, no "environment" to foul, no natives to exploit, nothing, not even bacteria. The alternative to humans going there is death, forever. And not "human" death, either, but total death. No life. Deader than the worst possible nuclear holocaust could ever make Earth. If that is truly your position, fine, but I hope I can at least remove the fashionableness from your pose.)

snth• 14 years ago

Is there no Hacker News story that can pass without reference to copyright?

javert• 14 years ago

Privatizing area on the moon would be a great way to fuel colonization there.

ConstantineXVI• 14 years ago

If we had moon lobbyists, at least NASA would get better funding. I'd take moon lobbying over coal/oil/defense/farming/etc. any day.

CWuestefeld3• 14 years ago

I think part of the problem is that we're willing to accept bad behavior when it's done on behalf of the team we agree with.

If something is bad, then it's bad even when it's done by your team.

The end does not justify the means.

unfletch• 14 years ago

If we had moon lobbyists, it would probably be because the coal/oil/defense/farming/etc. industries discovered a way to make some money up there.

agnuku• 14 years ago

Truly historic feat. I'm working for the man on screen 1 as I watch more interesting happenings in space on screen 2.

mikemarotti2• 14 years ago

Is it me or is this getting absolutely no press?

mikemarotti2• 14 years ago

I guess it's now on the frontpage of CNN but still - I haven't heard any fanfare over this and it's pretty monumental.

twoodfin• 14 years ago

Matt Drudge had it in bright red at the top of the "fold" until a few minutes ago. It's still there now, but without the color highlight.

chucknelson• 14 years ago

You'd think that of all groups of individuals, mainstream media would be able to come up with some ultra-hyperbolic headline to make this seem more exciting to the general public.

Dexec• 14 years ago

"Member of the PayPal MAFIA launches a ROCKET directly at the International Space Station. More at 11."

DanBC2• 14 years ago

I agree.

More people watched European Song Contest than are seeing this.

Yet again something profoundly depressing about modern life.

vecinu5• 14 years ago

I find that ESC used to be a great contest that launched some great artist (think ABBA). While it may not be as powerful or entertaining as it once was, I don't see why someone should be judged for choosing to watch it over a space launch.

I think you'll find that the majority of the population is not interested in space exploration or development so it is quite okay to assume they would watch ESC over the launch.

kristofferR• 14 years ago

They showed it live on CNN with a lot of commentary, same with the launch.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

I don't think its you. I've talked with various folks about the events playing out and the split between amazed enthusiasm and barely cognizant is not smooth at all. There is a noticeable number of people who don't care at all.

I think that is in part that a lot of people don't understand the significance of what has just occurred. Even now there are people in government who are 'alarmed' that a private company has this capability. After all, its a technology we're attempting to deny the North Koreans and now Elon Musk's company has all of the parts it needs to build an intercontinental weapons delivery system. The Dragon capsule can be 6 tons. Even neophyte nuclear weapon designers could probably make a device that is less than 6 tons. What is worse is the company won't just die a horrible death if our government pulls all of its contracts.

So where does that leave us? In a very very interesting spot. We are approaching a point where orbital launch technology will be available to 'everyone' and we have to deal with everyone having it. If you were around for the 'great super computer panic' that was when our government realized that there were no microprocessors they could constrain from export that would allow bad guys to build their own super computer using clustering techniques.

Its a similar problem but with the twist of being actionable (or being able to exploit it against the national interests of the US more easily)

Its also one of the reasons I've been following the progress of SpaceX trying to build their own launch facility in Texas. You might see how that combination (private space craft company + private launch facility) would exacerbate the problems for people who wish to keep this particular genie contained as long as possible.

morsch4• 14 years ago

Is being able to launch into orbit equivalent to being able to launch an ICBM?

I must admit I haven't thought about what the privatization of space (and SpaceX specifically) means regarding weaponization and proliferation. I suppose I always figured the main thing restricting proliferation is engineering the payload and not the delivery system. I guess that's only true for nuclear proliferation, though.

christiangenco2• 14 years ago

Here's an animated gif of it docking: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/123449/dragon/Dragon%20docking%20wit...

stevenleeg• 14 years ago

For anyone who wants a smoother video version of this,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_NBoSFpykY

rodh257• 14 years ago

Amazing stuff, also amazing is being able to watch the live feed from space on my phone!

jaems33• 14 years ago

Go Canada(rm)!

jasonadriaan• 14 years ago

It's incredibly difficult to overstate the importance of this moment for science and humanity as a whole. The commercialization of space travel is the only way that we will ever see the stars, as no longer are we at the mercy of the fluctuating interest in space travel from the already over-extended tax payers of certain nations. This is a beautiful moment for humanity, and a damn awesome way to start the weekend!

impldefined• 14 years ago

Personally my view is the exact opposite. Privatizing space travel will never bring us to the stars. It will get us into orbit for very high fees but e.g. deep space exploration? Too expensive, too low likelyhood of payoff. But for the really long term survival of humanity, it's a must.

crusso• 14 years ago

I'll see your exact opposite view with with my own exact opposite view.

Privatizing Space will do the same thing for it that privatizing the Internet did for all of us. It will take a government-pioneered oddity that was out of reach of the masses and explore millions of ways to make it of financial benefit to the entrepreneurs who can get there first. Like with the Internet, society will be pulled along in the vortex of the Race to Space. Space will become accessible for a price and in ways that would have been inconceivable a decade before.

The technical challenges with space travel are much greater and so the time before we reach the exponential part of the curve is further away, but when the critical mass of Space travel technology has been reached it will be like the Internet in the 1990's. The Internet had been around for 20 years and only governmental and academic types even knew anything about it. Within a few years of its commercialization, its use and uses had exploded. We went from the average joe not knowing anything about it to seeing an abundance of commercials on television for it within just a couple of years.

I mention the Internet, but the pattern is one that you can see in the adoption of transatlantic sailing, rail travel, electricity, automobiles, etc. Space travel will be no different.

learc83• 14 years ago

SpaceX is going to drastically reduce the price to orbit, which will drastically reduce the cost of all space exploration.

Substantially cheaper price to orbit will allow us to start doing things like economically assembling large spacecraft in space.

A cheaper method to orbit is a necessary building block of everything else, and so far NASA hasn't been able to do that. Congress views NASA as a giant jobs program, and as long as they are running NASA, cheap isn't realistic.

ippisl2• 14 years ago

Peter diamandis new company is aimed at mining asteroids. One of the ideas of how to do this is to build an engine that will move asteroids or large parts of asteroids to orbit. This kind of engine, if developed, seems very useful for space colonization.

Getting investment for such a company probably wouldn't have been possible without a private space industry.

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

It's incredibly difficult to overstate the importance of this moment

I tire of statements like this. Either you have no capacity for exaggeration, or I have grossly misunderstood and the docking is actually more momentous than the discoveries of fire, DNA, germ theory, cell theory, flight, and nuclear physics combined.

Now, if we figure out how to beat aging and live forever, that is something whose impact might be difficult to overstate.

mossplix• 14 years ago

living forever would lead to our extinction ... in along run our genome would adapt and we would become sterile

kghose• 14 years ago

Not docked yet.

pbharrin• 14 years ago

One small step for man, One giant leap for private enterprise.

camiller5• 14 years ago

Dragon was berthed to the Harmony module of the #ISS at 12:02 p.m. EDT

cobrausn• 14 years ago

My favorite quote about this is from Don Pettit, right as the ISS grabbed the Dragon capsule.

"Looks like we've got a Dragon by the tail," station flight engineer Don Pettit said moments after grappling the craft over northwest Australia.

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/falcon9/003/status.html

Maxious• 14 years ago

And after that "okay, this was a great sim. now to turn it around and do it for real".

ak217• 14 years ago

[2008] "Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we're going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work." (http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2008/08/musk_qa)

Elon Musk doesn't seem like the easiest person to work with, but I'm having a hard time thinking of a more accomplished human.

morsch4• 14 years ago

The enthusiasm shown for this accomplishment on Hacker News is borderline ridiculous. This comment seems particularly over the top to me. What does this even mean, how do you measure the attribute of "being accomplished" on a 1d scale across vastly different kinds of accomplishment? To me it seems obvious that some of the medical accomplishments of the past 100 years are easily and vastly more important than a private space launch, but I wouldn't normally compare those things in such a manner. I had to rewrite this paragraph multiple times because it feels so bizarre. I haven't even touched on the question whether and to what degree you can ascribe an accomplishment of a group of people to an individual, which makes the whole comparison even stranger and less meaningful.

I mean, I guess some people here subscribe to the notion that space travel is imperative for human survival. In that case, you might argue that each step towards it is more valuable than anything else that does not immediately push towards human space travel. Human space travel will save humanity, your piddly vaccine only saves a couple of hundred million people. But that seems a bizarre argument to make (and maybe that's why one really makes it).

Edit: -3 in one hour? Wow. For what it's worth, I made this comment in good faith.

paulsutter• 14 years ago

SpaceX is exciting because Elon is one of us. He's a silicon valley founder who put all his personal money on the line to change the world. Paraphrasing PG, he didn't forget his dreams and he's inspiring many of us to remember our own.

SpaceX is just beginning. His launch costs are now as low as the Russians (the cheapest). The Falcon 9 heavy will cut that in half, and reusability is intended to cut it by 80% again (10x improvement is the next goal). Watch this animation to see reusability, it's awesome:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IbxqsWLXsw

Elon has said he will consider the company to have failed if they dont get reusability to work. These cost improvements will make many things possible and change the world. And these too are just the beginning.

tobtoh• 14 years ago

I think if you are comparing 'accomplishments' based on 'lives saved', then your comment has a lot of validity.

But to me, the reason the SpaceX success is so noteworthy is that that achievement isn't just new, but ground breaking on so many levels.

* first time a private firm has created, launched and docked a space craft

* done it on a budget several magnitudes less than ever done before

* done it with a fraction of the staff than conventionally used

* opened a new era in space development

Whilst I'm being grossly unfair to medical researchers, at a simplistic level I see most new vaccines like the release of a new model of car - beneficial, but incremental development . Whereas I see the SpaceX achievement as something that broke all the conventional wisdom on how things could be done.

And that's what makes it so special and worth celebrating a bit more than other accomplishments.

mkr-hn• 14 years ago

I expect HN to show the same level of enthusiasm when science finds a reliable cure for melanoma. This is the first artificial event in space so significant since the moon landings.

starpilot• 14 years ago

This isn't an efficient market of valuing accomplishments with enthusiasm coins. We could go all day with the "who deserves more enthusiasm/respect?" debate. The cancer researcher? The AIDS researcher? The clean water specialist? The billionare philanthropist, who paid for all of the above? Space travel captivates a lot of people on HN. That's just the nature of the community; it doesn't intend to debase the work of others.

Arjuna2• 14 years ago

"The enthusiasm shown for this accomplishment on Hacker News is borderline ridiculous."

Some thoughts:

1. We all want to live in a world where dreams become reality. I think a lot of us are passionate at this moment in time because we are seeing a dream unfold; not just Elon's, but for everyone that is working to make it a reality.

2. The majority of us are builders, and we are naturally going to be excited about a company that is building, particularly at this level.

3. (Speaking as an American, here)... in the U.S., I think there has been an under-current feeling for the last several years, that could perhaps be paraphrased as, "Where are we heading, as a nation?" I think it is easy for us to lose touch with the pulse of the nation when we are head-down in code at a start-up or elsewhere, but I think this feeling is real. So, this is perhaps at the root of at least some of this passion and excitement. It perhaps affirms, in some way to us, that the collective "We" are still builders.

4. The U.S. does not currently possess the capability of human spaceflight. We are at a point in history that is similar to the human spaceflight gap that existed between the Apollo program and the Space Shuttle program. The success of SpaceX and this mission is another incremental step toward resuming that mission capability.

I think that something that speaks to this is symbolic: an American flag that flew on-board STS-1 was left on the ISS by the crew of STS-135. It is awaiting return to the U.S. by the next American crew that is launched from the U.S.

5. As has been noted already, Elon is one of us. He is a builder. I do not know all of the figures, but I do know that he has put at least $100M dollars of his own money into SpaceX [1]. I think we all understand that these types of efforts are the intense result of many people collaborating together across various organizations, different backgrounds, etc. However, the reality is that these types of efforts require serious vision and investment, and I think, again, to see a builder like Elon achieve this is extremely motivating.

6. Finally, there is something intrinsic inside of all of us that longs to explore; perhaps for many of us, space is the ultimate expression of that longing ("Space, the final frontier."), and we are over-flowing with enthusiasm, wonder and hope at this achievement.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNwg8FvfuuU#t=248

ivankirigin• 14 years ago

Your comment is unnecessarily negative and doesn't add much here.

Are you really trying to gauge whether Musk is an accomplished person? Paypal, Tesla, and SpaceX are each the most successful companies to date in their respective markets.

Everyone on this thread would think a vaccine that saves hundreds of millions of people is a good thing. Be reasonable

CamperBob2• 14 years ago

How much karma do you need in order to downvote something on HN? I'll be back when I've got that much.

srl4• 14 years ago

I too find the enthusiasm, displayed here and on reddit and everywhere in between, for this to be patently ridiculous, although not for the same reasons. I'm a great fan of space exploration, in all forms - observation, robotic, and human - but this docking is simply not a significant event. Not in space exploration terms, and not in the grander scheme of human activity. It is neither a scientific nor a societal accomplishment, it showcases neither innovation nor courage. It's just - something that happened. Something that happened roughly on a monthly basis until a few months ago. I don't care.

I think a great deal of the enthusiasm stems from the fact that it's a private company doing this, and not a government. Well, I'm most emphatically not enthusiastic about that. In fact, it smells rather dystopian. Governments can, with care, be kept under control. However bad corruption gets, democratic governments will always be bound to the electorate. Corporations - no. I don't want space exploration to be led by a private company, and certainly not by a small group of insanely rich individuals. As much as I admire Elon Musk - and Jeff Bezos, and all the others trying to get us back into space - these people are not the ones who ought to be leading us.

Part of my discomfort with this course of events is no doubt just my personal political views - I'm about as far left as you can go. But what's happening also reminds me of some of Heinlein's stories - when space exploration was fueled by money, human rights (especially the collective right of self determination) fell by the wayside.

If the cost of going to space is the permanent privatization of exploration, I can't be enthusiastic about it.

InclinedPlane• 14 years ago

Who saves lives? Doctors? Medical researches? People who feed the hungry?

Consider something such as a weather satellite. What goes into such a system? What inventions and breakthroughs are responsible for its existence? Things like CCD imagers, micro-chips, and, yes, rockets. Are the inventors of such things savers of lives? Surely yes, because it is through weather satellites that we are able to track and monitor hurricanes, typhoons and other severe weather phenomena which historically have been great killers of lives. Today hurricanes do not hit land by surprise, we have enough time to warn people so that they can evacuate or hunker down. Over the years this has saved perhaps millions of lives. Are vulcanologists life savers? Sometimes they are. What about automobile manufacturers? Well, without automobiles it would take a lot longer for EMTs to get to people who are injured and a lot longer to get them to a hospital, so a lot more people would surely be dead without automobiles. If you were to see a construction worker digging up the road to work on the sewer would you think of that man as a life saver? He most surely is though because clean running water and sewer systems are some of the most effective methods of reducing the spread of disease. That man isn't just digging up the street he's helping to keep you free from cholera, as surely as any doctor or medical researcher would.

Reality is a lot more complicated and intermeshed than a naive, simplistic interpretation would indicate. What figure from, say, the 17th century is most responsible for the greatest reduction in untimely deaths since then? Such a question is almost impossible to answer.

But more than that, life is about more than merely living. This is the fallacy of Maslow's hierarchy at play here. The idea that an individual who is ill, hungry, in danger, or impoverished must necessarily forgo self-esteem, appreciation of art, romance, and intellectual pursuits. That is a backward and harmful way of approaching the world, whether on an individual level or on the scale of all humanity. Yes there are great problems in the world, we are ill as a people, we are hungry, we are not safe from violence and war. But should we shun poetry, music, and science for that? It is often through introspection and art that we can gain a better understanding of our fellow humans, that we can set aside hatred and bigotry. It is often through the pursuit of science and engineering that we find better ways to treat and prevent disease and to feed the hungry.

So I would say that we can and should strive toward putting humans in orbit and on Mars and it is just as noble a thing to do as curing disease or feeding the hungry. Because it represents what humanity is all about, pushing frontiers, exploration, knowledge, adventure. It is those things which make life worth living and give greater potency to more direct efforts of saving lives (just as the existence of art, food, and music do). And they also give us new perspectives. The photograph of the Earth from the moon by the Apollo 8 astronauts has been enormously inspirational throughout history, for example. Perhaps along the way who knows what new technology will come about. And, of course, more than likely we will develop the technology to divert asteroids away from Earth (perhaps saving billions of lives) and also make Earth a multi-planetary species, which could save human civilization from utter annihilation at some point.

adventureful• 14 years ago

That's a very sad post.

By that scale, Einstein's work was mostly lame, because hey, plenty of it is still theoretical. And he didn't cure polio did he?

And Steve Jobs wasn't accomplished, because the iPhone is just a toy, right? It doesn't cure cancer.

And the Wright Brothers. Well, I guess human flight could be subscribed to as being imperative to human survival. But really, humans were never meant to fly were they? They'd have wings otherwise, so how could flight be all that important? It's not like human flight cures AIDS or anything.

adriand2• 14 years ago

What a great interview. I liked this part too:

> Wired.com: Your whole mantra is "cheaper and more reliable." But so far you're zero for three, which is anything but cheap and reliable, and guys like GlobalSecurity.org's John Pike say the reason it has taken billions of dollars and tens of thousands of people to successfully launch rockets is physics, not some new design or economic model.

> Musk: Guys like John Pike have existed since the dawn of time, and if you listen to people like that then things will never get better, never change. It's a false point of view. Yes, we need to put some rockets into orbit. But the first order of business is to get rid of design errors, which we're doing, and once those are eliminated then you're dealing with repeatability, and people should judge what we're doing from the point of view of all the design issues we've ironed out through these F1 test flights.

It's truly inspiring to read something like this after the person has been vindicated. The amount of patience, perseverance and determination required to make this a successful venture is enormous, but add to that the ridicule and criticism of your peers and it must be extremely difficult.

mturmon2• 14 years ago

The earliest days of orbital rocketry were filled with the same kind of spectacular failures, embarrassment of very gifted engineers, and perseverance.

6ren• 14 years ago

It's pretty amazing that the (possibly) most accomplished human did a reddit AMA: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kpt9f/tesla_spacex_and... His answer on motivation was striking to me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K8NkJpUei4#t=28m05s

  My drive to get it done is somewhat disconnected from hope, enthusiasm or anything
  else. I just... I... I actually don't care about hope or enthusiasm... motivation. I
  just give it all I've got irrespective of what the circumstances may be. [...]
  Yeah... You just keep going and get it done.

Arjuna2• 14 years ago

I mentioned this yesterday, but I believe Reisman's quote really captures that feeling we are all having about SpaceX and particularly their first ISS mission:

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][2]

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

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

savrajsingh• 14 years ago

What's amazing is SpaceX beat companies like Boeing to the punch. That's pretty remarkable!

khuey2• 14 years ago

To what punch? Boeing built parts of the Saturn V rocket that launched the Apollo missions 45 years ago.

jlgreco5• 14 years ago

Built parts.

As wikipedia puts it: "Each section was designed by von Braun in Huntsville and built by outside contractors such as Boeing, North American Aviation, Douglas Aircraft, and IBM."

The extreme vertical integration (and pricing model) SpaceX has is what makes it special.

fidotron2• 14 years ago

Not at all. It's classic innovator's dilemma where Boeing, Lockheed etc. simply can't face the implications of competing with someone coming in from outside.

SpaceX just won't have the same baggage that bigger outfits do.

ippisl2• 14 years ago

The innovator's dillema mainly talks about the lack of motivation of established entities to offer a lower cost service so they won't hurt current profits. this doesn't seem the case.

tsotha• 14 years ago

It's classic innovator's dilemma where Boeing, Lockheed etc. simply can't face the implications of competing with someone coming in from outside.

Absolutely. SpaceX is already the cheapest $/kg to orbit. If things play out like Musk intends, they'll cut that number to a tenth of what it is today. There's no way Boeing can compete without a complete restructuring of its space business.

They certainly weren't going to put money into bringing this situation about.

codeonfire• 14 years ago

Maybe all the Boeing people quit and went to SpaceX. I really want to know the profiles of every person working at SpaceX, where they came from, and did they build their knowledge in the last four years or last thirty. Its a great story that a company can do this in just a few years, but we need to be honest about what effort and time it truly took from all participants. Personally, I would be thrilled to learn that a new company with greenhorn engineers could do this in a short amount of time. If the enabling factor is a group of aerospace veterans, that's great also.

mturmon2• 14 years ago

There are a lot of aerospace veterans at SpaceX.

I know one senior JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab -- NASA) engineer who went there early on, and another one who went later to work on docking. Making reliable space launches is a practical skill, and there are a lot of procedures that have been learned over decades that are definitely not textbook material. It has to be picked up in apprenticeship fashion.

In their promotional materials on their www site, they used to say that they were located in Southern CA to take advantage of the large pool of aerospace talent here.

philwelch5• 14 years ago

Is it? Knowing people who have worked at Boeing and hearing their stories, and following how much Boeing has struggled in recent years, it's not surprising at all. If there was ever a hidebound company rapidly outliving its usefulness, it was Boeing. And the company is struggling. In airliners, they keep getting beat by Airbus, and time after time comes up second, third, fourth best in defense bids. Once, when they lost a defense bid to Airbus for a tanker, they lobbied to have the military run the selection over again.

The entire aerospace industry has been bureaucratic and hidebound for decades. The story of Lockheed's Skunk Works almost belies the point--they were certainly innovative, but even in the 1960's, the only way they could accomplish it was to get all the best engineers and hide from the bureaucrats long enough to just build shit. Up until the first stealth fighter or so (the F-117) it worked, but it doesn't seem to anymore, considering all the problems, delays, crashes, and other mishaps the F-22 has had.

(Though, to be fair, the F-22 is a much more difficult undertaking. The F-117 had exactly one thing different from any other airplane from the 70's: it was shaped funny. It also had fly-by-wire because it was aerodynamically poor, but the engineering was far more conservative. The F-22 has lots of innovations at once--stealth, supercruise, improved avionics, the whole works--which entails far much more risk. Also, the 117 was a black project, which means there were a couple smart people in the Pentagon approving it and working as their clients, as opposed to the 22 where there were hundreds of Congressmen and thousands of federal bureaucrats to worry about as clients.)

maeon3• 14 years ago

Pass a law that whoever parks their pasty butt on the surface of another planet owns x square meters of it, but they have to land in person and affix a notary.

there has got to be a way to monitize seeding a civilization on mars.

johneth• 14 years ago

I know you're probably not being serious, but this would stop that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

nitrogen• 14 years ago

Yes, it would affect the "pass a law" part of the OP's proposal, but would Mars-bound indiviual colonists, representing only themselves and no nation, be bound by treaties between the dinosaurs of Earth?

danielweber• 14 years ago

Treaties can be, and have been, renegotiated.

antimora• 14 years ago

It looks like SpaceX control room is using VLC to stream video =)

jaysignorello• 14 years ago

Truly inspiring. Elon Musk has and certainly will continue to inspire me as an entrepreneur and technologist. I hope I can get the chance to meet him one day.

In his interviews, he seems like a very nice guy...I wonder what it is like to work for him.

joxie• 14 years ago

This is so cool! I can't wait to see more humans in space.

akandiah• 14 years ago

Hatch Opening now in progress: http://www.spacex.com/webcast/

Space Station grabs SpaceX Dragon ship

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