SpaceX Tuesday...
Discussion
FurtiveFreddy said:
Too cloudy here to see anything last night. ISS is due to be over me at 22:37 tonight. Will the Dragon be close by then?
It should be getting closer. The rendezvous and docking is scheduled for Tuesday.By tonight I would expect all you will see is the Dragon itself rather than the Dragon and the bits it discarded.
The ISS orbits about 250 miles above the earth, but Dragon is released by the second stage at around 130 miles up.
Then they slowly do a series of separate burns for height-adjustment (HA) and co-elliptic orbit (CE) over a couple of days to step it up close to ISS.
They're really paranoid about spacecraft approaching the ISS and they bring them in really slow. It takes about 40 minutes to go from 250 meters out to 30 meters. At that point they run a system check to make sure everything is working OK. After that they'll creep it in again. They don't trust them to dock themselves yet, so they grab them with the Canadarm and pull them in on that.
Then they slowly do a series of separate burns for height-adjustment (HA) and co-elliptic orbit (CE) over a couple of days to step it up close to ISS.
They're really paranoid about spacecraft approaching the ISS and they bring them in really slow. It takes about 40 minutes to go from 250 meters out to 30 meters. At that point they run a system check to make sure everything is working OK. After that they'll creep it in again. They don't trust them to dock themselves yet, so they grab them with the Canadarm and pull them in on that.
Beati Dogu said:
The ISS orbits about 250 miles above the earth, but Dragon is released by the second stage at around 130 miles up.
Then they slowly do a series of separate burns for height-adjustment (HA) and co-elliptic orbit (CE) over a couple of days to step it up close to ISS.
They're really paranoid about spacecraft approaching the ISS and they bring them in really slow. It takes about 40 minutes to go from 250 meters out to 30 meters. At that point they run a system check to make sure everything is working OK. After that they'll creep it in again. They don't trust them to dock themselves yet, so they grab them with the Canadarm and pull them in on that.
It's really awesome how these things are done. Then they slowly do a series of separate burns for height-adjustment (HA) and co-elliptic orbit (CE) over a couple of days to step it up close to ISS.
They're really paranoid about spacecraft approaching the ISS and they bring them in really slow. It takes about 40 minutes to go from 250 meters out to 30 meters. At that point they run a system check to make sure everything is working OK. After that they'll creep it in again. They don't trust them to dock themselves yet, so they grab them with the Canadarm and pull them in on that.
Playing Kerbal has given me the absolute very tiniest understanding as to how orbits/intercepts work.
Really fascinating stuff.
Beati Dogu said:
Here's some nice footage of the Dragon going overhead, taken in Oxfordshire:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qw-w31TVAE
That's what I saw last night! Thanks to Eric for his 'Will we see it in the UK?' post just beforehand for getting me to go outside and wait!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qw-w31TVAE
king Rocket, otherwise known as their Mars project. I'm interested to hear what she thinks of the company when I go over to visit later in the year.RobDickinson said:
Lots of rumours they are tough on their staff but thats probably par for the course not sure if it will be much different from boeing.
BFR/MCT would be an amazing project to work on
BFR/MCT would be an amazing project to work on
Probably worth a grind to work on something so incredible but stories abound of employees having to commit to pretty much only their jobs and not lasting very long. Proper tough stuff apparently. I read somewhere that Musk sleeps 4 hours a night - I wouldnt be surprised if he wanted his employees to follow his lead!Gassing Station | Science! | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff