Dragon Flies: Impressive vs. Electrifying

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One word comes to mind to describe SpaceX’s flawless Saturday launch and subsequent docking of the Crew Dragon with the International Space Station: Impressive. I’d add another kicker to that: Desperately needed. In a year that’s not even half over and that has proven uniformly awful so far, an undiluted success lifts the spirits, salves the soul and gives us all reason to appreciate excellence for its own sake.

SpaceX’s achievement is all the more impressive because as the brash new kid on the block, it beat out the likes of Boeing and the United Launch Alliance, a powerful pairing of Boeing and another aerospace giant, Lockheed. And it did so at a lower cost to the U.S. taxpayer, according to some assessments.

In 2002, when SpaceX came out of the ground, it seemed like a quirky, ego-driven longshot and was given little chance to succeed. But it got busy, proved smart, agile and creative and just a month ago overtook ULA to earn a launch cadence record. Saturday’s mission marked the 88th Falcon launch with more than 50 of those boosters recovered for reuse. Saturday’s first stage landed perfectly on SpaceX’s offshore barge and will presumably see another flight.

Even though the boosters are recoverable and thus more complex, they apparently cost less to produce than ULA’s expendable rockets. And perhaps the recycling economics really do, as Elon Musk claims, reset the cost to orbit. NASA’s own inspector general says it will pay Boeing about $90 million a seat to low earth orbit, while SpaceX gets $55 million. We had been paying Russia about $80 million for a Soyuz ride to the ISS.

With its Starliner spacecraft, Boeing lags behind SpaceX and embarrassed itself at the start of its own annus horribilis when software glitches in a February test flight kept it from an ISS dock and were caught just in time to keep from losing the vehicle. It’s scheduled for another unmanned trial in November, but a manned flight will have to wait until next April. By then, SpaceX will have launched its second crewed mission.

The Dragon launch caught just enough of the public’s attention to line the bridges around Cape Canaveral with spectators and to generate some live cable coverage. It felt like a resuscitation of sorts, representing the first manned mission from U.S. soil since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011.

As the Falcon ascended heavenward, the talking heads couldn’t resist calling the mission “historic.” Later in the day, many headline writers did the same. Someone on the desk at The New York Times caught a breath and nailed it with this: Launch Opens a New Space Age and Rekindles Past Glory. I wonder if the editor considered and rejected “reignites.”

I think anyone who grew up with the 1960s space race would naturally react to the “historic” claim by recalling that NASA, in 1965, launched Gemini 6 and 7 for a perfect rendezvous at a time when guys with skinny ties and slide rules were figuring out the science to do this. It’s now old hat. Space stations? Been there, too. Don’t forget the multiple launches to Skylab in 1973 and 1974.

The new era part is aspirational and we can all cheer that it happens. The era is the age of commercial space, wherein the profit motive drives trips into the cosmos, not government-funded public exploration. Thus far, this is a bit of misnomer because NASA—you and I—are still paying for most of this through contracts guaranteeing the private investment has a customer, even if the creative impulses now originate more with SpaceX than with NASA. But NASA is still knee deep in what these companies are doing. And if you’re rich enough, you can eventually buy your own ride on a Dragon, something that was never gonna happen with an Apollo spacecraft, although Russia sold a Soyuz tourist seat to the ISS in 2009 and will again next year.

NASA plans to stay in the game with the ambitious Artemis project to return crews to the moon’s south pole by 2024, the beginning of what may become a long-term lunar presence. As part of that project, the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program just awarded contracts to Masten Space Systems for a series of robotic scientific missions ahead of a 2024 landing. Those follow the SpaceX model of private companies leading, with NASA paying and directing. It gives them more creative control than Grumman ever had when it built the lunar modules so, yeah, it’s fair to call it historic. I don’t mind my tax dollars being spent on moon exploration.

Beyond that, Mars awaits and Musk is pushing NASA in that direction. He’s already said he wants to colonize the red planet, but if this weekend’s launch made that appear less of a nutty idea to some people, it didn’t to me. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth a crewed mission, however. If nothing else, SpaceX has proved it has the chops to do that. The unknown is whether the country has the will to be that bold again or will be happy just inhabiting low earth orbit?

I’ve had enough trips around the sun to have been through some bad years and like 2020 so far, 1968 was one of them. There was a pandemic that year, although few remember that. Everyone remembers the year started horrifically with the Tet offensive in Vietnam, grew worse with the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and worse yet when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated the week I graduated from high school. Then, on Christmas eve, Apollo 8 electrified the world when it orbited the moon and there was no quibbling about that being historic.

You’ve got big shoes to fill, Elon Musk. You’re on the way.

 

 

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19 COMMENTS

  1. MY first thoughts upon seeing the interior of the Dragon was how different it looked from Apollo capsules. It reminded me of the first class seating aboard an early B747 I went out of my way to fly on back in 1970. I just learned that when they slept, they changed to pajamas, even. AND … they’re not coming back for four months or so.

    I remember skinny ties and slide rules back in the 60’s when I was in college. The first four function calculators didn’t start coming out until ~1971 or so. To think we went to the moon with those and crude computing power and now this … it IS amazing.

    The 1968 Hong Kong flu pandemic killed an estimated one to four million … how come I don’t remember an economic shutdown or masks or over reaction?

    • Left unchecked, the Hong Kong flu of 68/69 killed about 100,000 Americans when it finally ran its course.

      Covid-19 has killed that many even with massive precautions. And it’s not done yet.

    • With a few contingency buttons. I would have liked to see in-cockpit video of them testing out the manual maneuvering of the vehicle, since they apparently don’t even have hand controllers. But it sounds like it worked out fine.

    • Touch screen is cool, but there is a reason the flap and gear handles are shaped the way they are.

      Same thing happened in the F-35. Human factors went out the window in favor of the video game concept. Good luck reaching the correct “button” when the pucker factor is high.

  2. I was excited to see a crewed launch live from the US again, and I like the telemetry SpaceX provides. I look forward to watching the reentry in about 4 months.

    Though I wasn’t around in 1968, I’m quite familiar with the history of that time and I was also thinking about the parallels between 2020 and 1968 with the high points being manned spaceflight-related. I look forward to seeing the next Dragon launch, and hopefully things will be going better in the world by then.

  3. 1968 was tough. Those who did not live it, a quick space overview is in the HBO Series “From the Earth to the Moon” episode 4 “1968” about Apollo 8 flight around the Moon and the background happenings in the world.
    I was in uniform then and got more than my share of duty.

  4. Useless trivia Department:
    Gemini 6 launched AFTER Gemini 7.
    A buddy of mine worked on the Manhattan Project. After the war, he wound up at Monsanto, where he generated a couple of hundred patents. As a token of their appreciation, the firm gave Andy one of the first (pre-production) HP “scientific” calculators, in 1971. Andy let me have it, on open-ended loan! It out-performed my trusty slide rule, and it offered precision beyond two decimal places! The next year, when it went on sale as the HP-35, it cost $395 – the equivalent of $2,550 in 2020 dollars, which buys you five unlocked 128GB Samsung S-10 smart phones.
    Glad that the launch went well, even though I’m not much of a fan of manned spaceflight.

    • I remember the HP-35 well, Yars. Always lusted for one but $400 exceeded my ability to afford one at the time. Remind me … what was that strip for?

      • Strip? You might be thinking about the magnetic “card” reader on the HP-65 (1974; $795).

        The contents of my top drawer include two TI-30Xs, a TI-30Xa, and a TI Money Manager. Pack Rat.

        • Ah, yes … I remember now … the infamous ‘ENTER’ key …
          Hopefully, your HP-35 has the little hole next to the off/on switch ?
          vintagecalculators.com/html/the_hp-35_calculator.html

    • I too remember the HP-35. A wealthy housemate acquired one of the first on the market. It could calculate any number raised to any exponent!!! The gold standard for every slide rule jockey. Still remember the lost art of entering data into the registers using “reverse Polish”.

      After a night of hard drinking someone challenged him to test the calculator by throwing out the 4th floor window of a Boston brownstone. Drugs, sex and alcohol – the future belonged to those who could tell the difference.

  5. This has been an interesting week for SpaceX. First, their fourth iteration of the Starship almost blew itself into orbit following an apparently successful static test fire. Then the successful first launch of the manned Dragon capsule that went off without a hitch. Fortunately the one that really counted was the good one. Historic or not, it was a great accomplishment for the young company. Maybe Boeing should hire Elon Musk as its CEO.

  6. I’m a native Floridian born in the early 60’s and I’ve followed NASA over the years. Watched the Challenger go up watching from the top of the ridge in Highlands County on that bright, clear, cold morning. I’m a cheerleader for the “Space Program”, regardless the accounting method. We support many things with our tax dollars and I believe the big picture ROI on Space exploration has been massive. Another important ingredient around Space is the multi-national colaboration and partnerships. What’s really different now is the ability to drill down into the engineering specifics. There are some really well produced YouTube Channels covering the current race in great detail. The only part of the Dragon launch that didn’t appear to go as planned was the recovery of the Falcon stage one. They got it back, but I don’t believe it landed on the barge the way Space X tried to present. Whatever, that’s nitpicking. I get to fly a fairly new SR 22 and it’s the same idea as Crew Dragon. I handle the launch and recovery/landing Perspective + takes care of the part in the middle.

    • I’m curious what you mean about the Stage I recovery? Looked OK to me and I watched a video of the barge arriving in Port Canaveral yesterday … all seemed well ???

      “… a native Floridian … ” …you belong in the Smithsonian

  7. Sorry, but the live feed was interrupted, and Of Course I Still Love You…

    can be seen on YouTube doing what some barges are now doing that other barges can only dream of…

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