http://www.spacex.com/webcast.php

This is the first attempt to orbit and return the dragon capsule, which is slated to become an important cargo carrier to/from the ISS. Eventually it will become human rated with a crew of up to 7 astronauts. This is pretty much the best shot a private company has to replacing the crew-delivery componenet of the space shuttle.

[Edited on December 8, 2010 at 8:52 AM. Reason : ]

12/8/2010 8:50:24 AM

15 minutes to go?

12/8/2010 8:51:15 AM

yep!

and it's the Falcon 9 rocket... I should have been more specific.

12/8/2010 8:51:45 AM

Everyone hurry and watch. They had an abort and evaluating the problem.

12/8/2010 9:11:19 AM

The next scheduled attempt will take place at 10:38 a.m. EST

12/8/2010 9:16:54 AM

I've got a bunch of friends that work for SpaceX! I hope that everything works out well for Falcon 9... at least someone is still making rockets in this country.

12/8/2010 9:18:28 AM

I hope it works out too... I'm not much of a fan about the way the space program has been handled, but this is one of the leading private companies that can actually accomplish something. (NASA already has >billion dollar contracts with this company. )

12/8/2010 10:23:01 AM

launch in about 3 minutes! (hopefully!)

12/8/2010 10:39:54 AM

just tuned in to see a fire truck go by

12/8/2010 10:53:35 AM

haha that was a great scene cut.

12/8/2010 10:56:12 AM

dang it

missed this

12/8/2010 11:02:59 AM

It was awesome. We threw it up on one of the 72" screens in the office and watched it go. Beautiful launch. Now just hope re-entry goes as smoothly for Dragon!

12/8/2010 11:04:54 AM

when is it supposed to reenter?

12/8/2010 11:10:26 AM

Only 2-3 orbits, so it shouldn't be up long.

12/8/2010 11:19:42 AM

Neato

12/8/2010 8:13:01 PM

oh great, now the government is privatizing nasa? i hope there's significant regulation in place, otherwise their goal will be to do what nasa already does, but cheaper.

12/11/2010 9:46:19 PM

^ you can thank Obama for this. He sure does love his free enterprise!

12/11/2010 9:58:07 PM

i'm not sure how I feel about privatization. this quote has stuck with me ever since i first saw the movie:

Quote :

"You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. "

[Edited on December 11, 2010 at 11:47 PM. Reason : .]

12/11/2010 11:47:17 PM

^ i know someone who works at space X and the ENTIRE staff there according to him (and including him) has a deep personal passion for space travel. At least in their current incarnation, they're not going to cut corners or create garbage products for the sake of the bottom line.

For their first successful test flight a while back, the owner of the company bought EVERYONE's bar tab in the entire company that night. The employees got so crazy, they are apparently banned for life from some hotel's lounge.

12/12/2010 2:38:21 AM

^FYI the owner of SpaceX is also the guy who created PayPal, Elon Musk, so he's pretty rich. But yeah it doesn't really matter how passionate they are about space travel... it works now because there is no competition. Once a few other companies come a long offering the same thing but for cheaper, people will start cutting corners.

12/12/2010 3:19:13 AM

^ i dunno... by the time that happens, it'll need to happen.

I don't think for these beginning steps of space travel (ie the next 30-100 years), they're going to be pumping out anything too unsafe.

[Edited on December 12, 2010 at 3:30 AM. Reason : ]

12/12/2010 3:29:49 AM

because we've perfected all other earthly forms of travel to be safe? is that the logic there?

12/12/2010 6:05:39 AM

Quote :

"i'm not sure how I feel about privatization. this quote has stuck with me ever since i first saw the movie"

Ironically, they were discussing government hardware. So I'm not sure what your point is.

Quote :

"it works now because there is no competition. Once a few other companies come a long offering the same thing but for cheaper, people will start cutting corners."

There is no risk of this happening until space travel becomes a commodity. Until that time, there will be every incentive for space travel to be a safe and pleasurable experience for all involved.


Anyone in the military will tell you, privately purchased gear almost always exceeds government issued gear in quality. Two space shuttles have been destroyed during the program and NASA, while it received an increased amount of congressional scrutiny (which is more of a nuisance and a show than anything meaningful) was never at real risk of going out of business. Were a private company to lose a spacecraft in an accident due to its own negligence, it would be sued out of existence and some of its employees could wind up in jail.


There is no reason for private space travel not to go forward.

12/12/2010 11:16:22 AM

Yeah, give these guys a little credit for doing something this awesome. You're acting like every private company is 100% motivated by greed to cut all corners and put the public in danger to maximize their dollar. Certainly, their aim is to maximize their dollar, but they aim to do it in the most efficient way (which does NOT include dropping rockets onto cities, or causing buildings to collapse, etc). There's plenty of exceptions to this, but space travel is not going to be one of them at the present time.

12/12/2010 12:49:30 PM

NASA will spearhead an effort to get them shut down.

The government doesn't like competition. Especially when the competition does it 10 times cheaper.

[Edited on December 12, 2010 at 1:06 PM. Reason : OMG the corporations are exploiting our precious space resource!]

12/12/2010 1:05:47 PM

Apparently the Soapbox is not big enough to contain your ignorance.

12/12/2010 1:06:39 PM

The truth can't be contained.

12/12/2010 1:07:13 PM

I don't believe NASA will be that malicious. More than likely, they will simply seek congressional effort to guarantee that NASA is entitled to a certain percentage of government space contracts, similar to how the NAVY has to have a certain amount of its work performed in government shipyards.

12/12/2010 1:07:19 PM

Yea, private companies have been doing launches for years of satellites and other packages into orbit. The manned aspect may be a new factor for them, but I think orbital spaceflight can be achieved safely and far more efficiently than government programs. If you guys were following the space program you would know that Elon has a contract with NASA to ferry supplies and eventually people to the ISS. NASA doesn't like not having their own vehicle to get to the station they built, but there is one thing worse than that; Russia having the only vehicle that can get to the ISS. They currently have NASA over the barrel as the only game in town. Their seat cost recently went from $20 million per person to $51 million a seat for Soyuz rides to the space station.

Private American Rocket > Russian Monopoly on rides to ISS

I think NASA can still find a lot of work to do with deep space research and flight. They can also help with safety standards for private flights, but bottom line, everybody has fucked up. And so far the government space program has killed more people than private. Government agencies can keep on going even if they lose flights and people. But blowing up a rocket or two with a customers satellite on the top can end a private space company even now. Toss a bodycount on top and one blown flight can kill the entire company.

[Edited on December 12, 2010 at 1:17 PM. Reason : ]

12/12/2010 1:12:37 PM

I could be wrong. Maybe NASA will be SpaceX's biggest customer, since NASA won't have an operational space vehicle for years to come.

12/12/2010 1:13:31 PM

Quote :

"NASA will spearhead an effort to get them shut down. The government doesn't like competition."

This is like saying that the government will shut down Blackwater Xe because it doesn't want competition. The really huge projects will still be the purview of the gov't, but the private industry will encourage innovation as well as give the government a COTS resource to augment their own research.

12/12/2010 3:23:35 PM

It's more like saying that USPS will attempt to have UPS and Fedex shut down....I'd avoid the blackwater thing around smc.

12/12/2010 3:26:14 PM

Quote :

"I don't believe NASA will be that malicious. More than likely, they will simply seek congressional effort to guarantee that NASA is entitled to a certain percentage of government space contracts, similar to how the NAVY has to have a certain amount of its work performed in government shipyards. "

Uhh… they’re getting their funding FROM NASA. NASA is all on board with this.

12/12/2010 6:55:37 PM

IMO, it's about damn time some private companies started with this stuff. NASA walked on the fucking moon over 40 years ago, and now these guys put a capsule around the earth twice. It's about fucking time, dammit.
NASA created the proof of concept and worked out the gritty science. Now these new guys can have some fun engineering it with their own ideas. NASA needs to move on to the next challenge. They need to refocus on ground-breaking science that private companies don't have the power or capital to work on. Let's get NASA to think up some next-generation propulsion systems or energy systems. Once they've figured those out, pass the information along to the rest of the world and let them figure out what to do with it.

12/12/2010 8:34:04 PM

Quote :

"NASA will spearhead an effort to get them shut down."

I know you are a trolling troll, but NASA has already given them billion dollar contracts.

12/13/2010 10:38:25 AM

NASA just seems lazy to me sometimes.

12/13/2010 10:41:10 AM

NASA is bound by a tremendous amount of red tape.

12/13/2010 10:42:31 AM

Ah, I see my old nemesis smc has reared his head. Either he is in fact a troll or he is just really ignorant. NASA is 100% supporting the private industry... we aren't trying to shut them down at all. In fact the President has stated multiple times that he fully wants the private space industry to go forward, and as part of the executive branch of the government NASA fully backs it. I understand if you disagree with certain things, smc, but I respectfully ask that you please do some research and make sure you know what you are talking about if you want to discuss this kind of thing.

On a personal note, yeah I'm a little sad that NASA won't be making the rockets anymore, but I'd rather have astronauts ride into space on an American built rocket (be it by SpaceX or whoever else) than paying the Russians. As tl states, we have plenty of other things to keep us occupied.

oh and toyota, it's honestly not that NASA is lazy. Believe me, we want to do plenty of things, but we are bound by a lot of bureaucracy. There is a lot of regulation and congressional debate behind getting even the smallest thing done. It isn't really even a budget thing... we only get like 0.5% of the national budget but that is enough.

[Edited on December 13, 2010 at 10:53 AM. Reason : ]

12/13/2010 10:50:37 AM

SpaceX Launch today. 10:10am

3/1/2013 9:03:46 AM

3/1/2013 9:24:56 AM

SOON.

3/1/2013 10:08:56 AM

uh oh

3/1/2013 10:34:34 AM

i missed it. what happened??!

i didn't miss the launch. i missed whatever would have caused you to say uh oh

[Edited on March 1, 2013 at 10:42 AM. Reason : ]

3/1/2013 10:37:36 AM

Got tons of friends over at SpaceX blowing up my Facebook feed.

3/1/2013 10:37:48 AM

problem with the Dragon's thruster pods. they are trying to fix it.

3/1/2013 10:50:03 AM

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2013/03/resilient-crs-2-dragon-pursuit-iss-sunday-berthing/

The thruster problem was fixed and Dragon successfully berthed with the ISS this morning

3/3/2013 10:50:59 AM

According to glassdoor, spacex is apparently a terrible place to work.

3/3/2013 11:51:37 AM

really? based on what criteria?

3/3/2013 4:14:18 PM

based on the reviews on glassdoor.com

Quote :

"52% of employees recommend this company to a friend"

[Edited on March 3, 2013 at 6:05 PM. Reason : .]

3/3/2013 6:03:52 PM

setemup

3/3/2013 7:00:06 PM