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| Science & Technology |
| SpaceX's Next Cargo Mission to Space Station is Mar 16 |
| 2014-02-07 |
| [An Nahar] The next cargo supply mission to the International Space Station by the U.S. company SpaceX has been set for March 16, NASA said Wednesday. SpaceX's unmanned Dragon capsule will launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 4:41 am (0941 GMT) on its third trip ferrying supplies and equipment to the orbiting lab, the U.S. space agency said in a tweet. Owned by Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk, SpaceX became the first commercial entity to reach the space station with its Dragon fat merchantman in 2012. The company has a $1.6 billion contract with NASA for a series of future supply missions. The Dragon, a reusable, gumdrop-shaped capsule, became the first commercial spacecraft to reach the ISS in 2012. Since then, Orbital Sciences has also successfully reached the space lab with its own beer-keg shaped Cygnus spacecraft, which delivers similar loads of cargo but then burns up on re-entry to Earth's atmosphere. Orbital has a contract with NASA worth $1.9 billion for eight cargo resupply missions to the global space lab. The pair of private companies have restored the United States' ability to reach the ISS after the retirement of the 30-year space shuttle program in 2011. Both capsules can carry thousands of pounds of gear, including hardware, equipment and science experiments. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #2 Current US Launcher Manifest out to 2029 |
| Posted by: 3dc 2014-02-07 01:00 |
| #1 Should have been in Jan but NASA keeps pushing it out. NASA also paying for special mods to capsule. This is delaying SpaceX's commercial flights as they only have one operational pad at the Cape and it has the NASA rocket. They had 3 other flights to launch by the end of April so one hopes they don't lose those contracts. (the end dates on the contracts are expiring but one hopes for SpaceX that they were extended.) The mods that NASA has requested are extensive enough that it's really a version 1.1 Dragon. Main published modifications are several large freezers. Scuttlebutt is that the Dragon is volume limited and not mass limited. The new version 1.1 Falcon 9 rockets are really a new rocket with much more lifting power. One fact that slipped in post Thaicom flight discussions is that the second stage still had 12.5 Metric Tons of fuel on it after launching the satellite into a super synchronous orbit. With the faring and sat weighing in at 5-6 mt this suggests the rocket can lift much more than it's advertised payload. Some speculate if the 12.5 had been burned down I could have lifted 19mt. This suggest that it might well be medium heavy weight advertising itself as a middle-weight rocket. It makes for great corporate Kremlinology. SpaceX has bought rights to several other pads on the Cape, has a functional one at Vandenburg for more polar orbits and is getting ready to build a private launch facility in Brownsville TX where the Rio Grande enters the Gulf. current speculation regarding the Boca Chica (Brownsville) site Latest informative article on the CRS-3 NASA-ISI Launch |
| Posted by: 3dc 2014-02-07 00:57 |