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Launching humans into space again from America - Space X

Tailgate

By Tailgate
in Daily Texan

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Izhmash
Izhmash

A few of my favorite shots from my time spent at Kennedy. It's impossible to express how amazing it is to experience a launch up close. Most of these are STS-115.  

RamjetFDO
RamjetFDO

It's what I used to do... Getting two vehicles moving that fast to be together at the same place at essentially 0.1 fps difference in velocity is a true orbital ballet.

RamjetFDO
RamjetFDO

Who wore it better?  

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MonkeyDoughnut

MonkeyDoughnut 10761

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Posted
6 minutes ago, jkates said:

The weather will either scrub it or allow it, it won't blow it up. 

They just said the weather is trending in the wrong direction. After saying for the past 30 minutes that it was trending in the right direction.

Lightning would be a major concern during fueling and when sitting full on pad

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 90538

Posted
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18 minutes ago, DCA_HORN said:
20 minutes ago, hayden_horn said:
i hope that they made the right decision re: the weather. i've got my entire family watching it

Dont worry about that. The monumental event and what it means for the future outweighs the risk of what a lot of us saw in elementary school.

That was such a surreal thing to happen.  Our teacher was too stunned to turn off the TV for a few minutes, until one of the girls did.  Then they took us in large groups to the study hall or gym/cafeteria, and the principal tried to explain it to us.  Bunch of us got picked up early by our parents.

There were some horrible jokes going around our school within a week or two.   We were living in a fairly remote place/small town, and I don't know where the hell the parents came up with those jokes to tell the kids (no way the kids came up with Head & Shoulders jokes on their own).  It wasn't like there was internet, and the nearest decent-sized town was two hours away.

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Paper_jam

Paper_jam 846

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1 hour ago, atomheartbevo said:

There were some horrible jokes going around our school within a week or two.   We were living in a fairly remote place/small town, and I don't know where the hell the parents came up with those jokes to tell the kids (no way the kids came up with Head & Shoulders jokes on their own).  It wasn't like there was internet, and the nearest decent-sized town was two hours away.

I swear I remember hearing the "what does NASA stand for" joke from other kids at school the next day.

 

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Homercles

Homercles 10206

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1 hour ago, MonkeyDoughnut said:

Even though scrubbed today.. still haven't been this excited for something in long, long time.  Need more space exploration these days

No kidding.  Also makes me sad to think of all those shuttle launches I didn’t watch because it was ‘routine’.  

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 90538

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Just now, Paper_jam said:

I swear I remember hearing the "what does NASA stand for" joke from other kids at school the next day.

Yep, still remember the answer to this day.  The shampoo joke.  The color of the eyes joke. 

I've often wondered how jokes like that manifest themselves back then.  Now, you can hop on twitter and people like Anthony Jeselnik are pumping out such jokes within minutes or hours of something bad happening.

But we were in the fucking boonies, in a town of less than 20,000, and the nearest "big" town was two hours away, with 50,000 people.    

It's possible one parent in the town was a comedian-type, or knew one, but the thing, I've talked to people who were living in other states back then, on both coasts, who heard the same jokes.    The exact same jokes.  

And somebody had to tell kids those jokes - there weren't a bunch of kids coast-to-coast conjuring those exact jokes up out of thin air.

But the shock jocks were not popular (Andrew Dice Clay was still a few years out from being popular), cable TV was not that widespread, and there certainly weren't raunchy Comedy Central-type shows going on back then.  And even then, stuff that was edgy wouldn't make it onto the cable networks for months.   Johnny Carson wasn't putting out these kinds of jokes.

It's really odd how fast those jokes popped up, and how uniform they were across the country.

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Texas Jeff

Texas Jeff 1998

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6 hours ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Just so I’m telling my boys correctly, this is the first manned launch?  First space launch? First manned space launch?  For this vehicle?

is this orbit only or is there payload and/or docking?

a link to mission parameters would suffice if it’s handy. 

here's what I think I know, but I'm not an expert:

It's the first manned launch for this platform, which I think is the first new launch platform since the Space Shuttle in 1982.  This gives us the ability to send people to space from our own soil, something we lost when the shuttle was retired.

Before this, they flew similar equipment on the Crew Dragon Demo-1 flight, but it travelled unmanned to the space station.  Then they had another test flight to prove the emergency escape systems would work.  The important step for this flight, named Crew Dragon Demo-2, is to add a two-person crew.  There is another flight planned for August called USCV-1, similar mission to this flight except with a full four person crew instead of a two-person crew.  After these first flights, there will be more to ferry people to and from the ISS.

Boeing is also developing a capsule similar to SpaceX's Dragon for similar missions.

The long term plan is to return to the Moon, relearn what we knew how to accomplish circa 1973, and eventually plan a trip to Mars.

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Wanker Bob

Wanker Bob 379

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10 hours ago, MonkeyDoughnut said:

Even though scrubbed today.. still haven't been this excited for something in long, long time.  Need more space exploration these days

It may just be me but I was far far far far more excited for unmanned to exploration opening up new frontiers like New Horizons than I was for yet another launch of humans to a space station that has existed for years. I was even more excited for Oumuamua info. 

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MonkeyDoughnut

MonkeyDoughnut 10761

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6 hours ago, Wanker Bob said:

It may just be me but I was far far far far more excited for unmanned to exploration opening up new frontiers like New Horizons than I was for yet another launch of humans to a space station that has existed for years. I was even more excited for Oumuamua info. 

For me this is bigger as it represents making human space travel "routine". No longer will it be a single government controlled whim but a commercial based industry. We will go further and faster than ever before. 

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Wanker Bob

Wanker Bob 379

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3 hours ago, MonkeyDoughnut said:

For me this is bigger as it represents making human space travel "routine". No longer will it be a single government controlled whim but a commercial based industry. We will go further and faster than ever before. 

I highly doing that. Private interests are about profit. I know Musk wants to go to Mars but there's a profit angle there. Things like New Horizons or the (hopefully) forthcoming James Webb are about exploration. Right now we just opened up space for profit seeking companies and hopefully gave NASA a non Russian avenue to get back into space. Not insignificant but not a big step towards exploration in my opinion. 

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 90538

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6 hours ago, NotActuallyALonghorn said:

One thing that struck me was how much more refined the capsule looked on the inside versus any previous space launch platform I've seen. It had a Star Trek look going on instead of all the switches and buttons and indicators and stuff we are used to seeing.

Imagine if they had continued development of the Saturn Vs, and refined everything about it, pulling out the heavy-ass computers/wiring, etc. in favor of newer materials, computers, etc.

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