Taxi for NASA! SpaceX to fly astronauts to space station

Re: My God, it's full of stars

Given the preferred previous employment was 'test pilot' and testing real edge of envelope and occasionally beyond aircraft I suspect a career move to astronaut may be a safer one.

This is a real problem that when a space vehicle goes bang then manned spaceflight is always brought into question. There have been losses, there will always be losses but aviation has shown how over time and learning from incidents can change something that is inherently dangerous into a mode of transport most of us will consider no more dangerous than taking the bus (and probably isn't).

All thanks to those early pilots who put their lives on the line in unproven craft. Always the right stuff and to be treasured for their heroism or just blindness to danger.

Re: My God, it's full of stars

Interesting line of argument. It seems that you're suggesting that since Musk didn't largely fund the whole effort out of his own pocket that SpaceX somehow isn't doing a good job. if you take your arguments for why SpaceX are unworthy and apply them to any other space equipment provider you'll find that they are all guilty of the same transgressions. SpaceX get paid by the government to ferry stuff into space. Just like DHL get paid by the government to ferry stuff overseas.

When NAA built the CSM for Apollo they did the initial development work out of their own pocket up until the point where they could prove that they had the capability of actually delivering the goods. Once the contract was awarded, everything after that was paid for by the government. NAA banked the profits from building the CSMs, some of which paid for the initial development work since NAA aren't a charity and they don't build spacecraft for the fun of it. And no, when Apollo 13 went bang, NASA didn't go to NAA and ask for their money back even though that failure led to a complete failure of the mission. At the end of the day the human race (and capitalism) was the winner. How is that any different to SpaceX?

As far as knowledge goes, NASA are a (relatively) open government agency, they publish mountains of technical data about everything they do, it's not hard to learn a whole lot about what they do without even having an ISS supply contract. From their point of view it would be highly irresponsible NOT to share everything they know with their suppliers as it makes for better hardware.

Finally, just wanted to check that you do realise that NASA don't actually make spacecraft right? The space shuttle was built by Boeing, Apollo CSM was NAA, Apollo LM was Grumman, Gemini was McDonnell Douglas. In every one of these cases NASA paid commercial rates for the hardware and contributed money and knowledge to the development. SpaceX building rockets for them is nothing new.

Re: My God, it's full of stars

I would still rather have Mr. Von Braun design the rocket I had to go to space in....... I am afraid even one of the great engineers from our time might struggle with and get someone killed

I think von Braun got rather more people killed than we've so far managed to kill trying to get into space, both amongst the launch crews and those on the receiving end.

Re: Better than most

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I asked because I was genuinely curious. The impression I have is that Space X's failure rate is low, but I'm very willing to have that impression corrected if the numbers show otherwise.

Re: Boo, hiss

> "No need to continue, we've got the idea."

No, it looks like YOU have an idea (apparently). Care to share it with us?

Previous systems...

"no shuttles exploded prior to the first manned missions."

Apart from very early airborne excursions on the back of the carrier 747 aircraft, no shuttle flew without a crew - the 5 ALT unpowered glides by Enterprise and the first 4 STS orbital launches were the test flights.

Re: Boo, hiss

Every rocket has an imperfect safety record. With current technology, there's always a chance something could go wrong. Same for planes and cars - they're fairly safe these days, but failures do occur sometimes. You judge the risk, and make your choice.

Re: Boo, hiss

Fairly certain that there were no unmanned shuttle missions.

Some stats:

Up until Challenger exploded the space shuttle was 1 failure from 25 launches (96% success)

Up until Columbia it was 2 failures from 113 launches (98.3%)

Final total was 2 failures from 135 launches (98.5%)

Falcon9 is currently 1 failure from 19 launches (95% success)

It's probably worth noting that the Space Shuttle was man rated from day 1 and so had a much more stringent test process before it was launched, to say nothing of the development cost.

After both Challenger and Columbia there was around a 2.5 year delay before the shuttle flew again. 8 months between Apollo 13 and Apollo 14 and it looks like SpaceX will have around a 1.5-2 year gap between this year's failure and the first crewed ISS flight (although there will be unmanned launches between now and then). The massive delays for the shuttle program were largely because the first flight back had to be manned so they had to be absolutely certain that they fixed the problem. And also they lost the crew which is always going to make people nervous. The really remarkable one is Apollo 14. You'd need balls of steel to be the first guys to get on the rocket that soon after a very nearly life ending situation like Apollo 13.

Re: Boo, hiss

Hello? Earth to Endicott....

There were no unmanned Shuttle missions. It carried humans on its first and every subsequent launch.

Re: Boo, hiss

"It's not "making light of", it's saying "WTF are they doing this considering the imperfect safety record!!!". I had assumed that that failure would delay manned flights for many years."

Many years? Both shuttle disasters resulted in Shuttle programme pauses of under 3 years.

Falcon 9 is a much simpler vehicle with far fewer components, and a more vertically integrated supply chain. There's no reason why SpaceX shouldn't be able to investigate the incident, isolate the root causes (both physical and procedural), and return to flight in a much shorter period, especially as the next few flights will be unmanned and they can validate their work before putting meat bags up front.

Moreover, the telemetry showed that the Dragon capsule was responsive until it disappeared over the horizon, which is indicative that in a manned launch, the launch-abort process would have made the entire process survivable (albeit unpleasant). You'd have lost the mission but not the crew.

Dragon remains an inherently safer system than the Shuttle - because you can push a panic button and separate the astronauts from an exploding vehicle very quickly.

Re: Boo, hiss

"no shuttles exploded prior to the first manned missions."

No unmanned shuttles ever flew(*). The first flight was a white knuckle ride and the crew still had ejector seats for the first few after that.

Not that they would have meant much if an O-ring had gone at an inopportune time.

(*) Except Buran. The Russians flew that exactly once to prove they could, then mothballed the project as too expensive and far too dangerous for humans to ride in. After losing a significant number of cosmonauts in the early days they developed a far more risk-averse culture than NASA has ever had.

Re: Boo, hiss

I think you mean 1 not 7. 7 was the first manned Apollo flight, the previous ones had been unmanned to test equipment.

Apollo 1 had the fire which killed the three astronauts during a test but it never left the ground.

I don't know why people seem worried about SpaceX, spacecraft have always been outsourced to private enterprise, no-one was ever worried before, the Shuttle, Soyuz and Ariane have all had multiple failures, some at the cost of life, SX have a very good track record, yes one failed but it was unmanned and they've changed it since getting the contract, it wasn't an engine fault, the internal bracing of the tanks snapped, it turned out to be due to a bad batch of aluminium, so they changed the design to prevent it happening again. I wish them well, I'm sure they'll do everyone proud.