5-25-2012

Dragon makes history with space station docking

The private company SpaceX made history Friday with the docking of its Dragon capsule to the International Space Station, the most impressive feat yet in turning routine spaceflight over to the commercial sector.

It marked the first time a business enterprise delivered a supply ship to the space station.

"There's so much that could have gone wrong and it went right," said an elated Elon Musk, the young, driven billionaire behind SpaceX.

SpaceX still has to get its Dragon back next week with a load of science gear; the retro bell-shaped capsule is designed to splash down into the ocean, in the style of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs

Although cargo hauls have become routine, Friday's linkup was significant in that an individual company pulled it off. That chore was previously reserved for a small, elite group of government agencies.

Not only that, the reusable SpaceX Dragon is designed to safely return items, a huge benefit that disappeared with NASA's space shuttles.

Without the shuttle, NASA astronauts must go through Russia, an expensive and embarrassing situation for the U.S. after a half-century of orbital self-sufficiency. Once companies master supply runs, they hope to tackle astronaut ferry runs.

Musk, who founded SpaceX a decade ago and helped create PayPal, said he can have astronauts riding his Dragon capsules to orbit in three or four years. He also runs the electric car company Tesla Motors.

The space station has been relying on Russian, Japanese and European cargo ships for supplies ever since the shuttles retired. None of those, however, can bring anything of value back; they're simply loaded with trash and burn up in the atmosphere.

There is a new space race to put a robot on the moon. i believe the Google prize is 20 million dollars and there is a 2013 deadline. One of the groups called 'Part Time Scientists' was featured at the GTC (my upcoming article will cover it) that uses the GPUs (since CPUs are not fast enough to compute landing simulations) to attempt to land at the old Apollo site.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57440 ... ous-rover/

Asimov



it was featured at the GTC as it is using Nvidia's technology

They are clearly doing things very wrong then, given that the lunar landers had the equivalent of on old style scientific calculator to ACTUALLY LAND ON THE MOON with and the super-computer mainframes at NASA that planned the trajectories and burn times etc would have been equivalent to a Commodore 64 at best.

They acknowledged it.

i won't explain it; because, i am writing it at this moment for my GTC article.
... just watch please it .. it's worth it as it shows how this group of volunteers are putting a robotic vehicle on the moon using GPU computing


http://smooth-las-akam.istreamplanet.co ... layer.html

They need computing power to have tons of data for multitudes of simulations. The Nasa apollo missions had real ppl, navigating in control with god on their side. The robot to the moon program is something entirely different. The simulations are priceless. It takes a lot of computing power to simulate as close to real as possible. They want to have all variables worked out with solutions already in place. Simulations are a huge part of science in the modern times. Their usefulness has brought us to a whole new level. We can learn a lot and be much better prepared without sacrifice. Simulations allow us to understand in levels far beyond our experiences. They get better with everyday and with this acceleration in the future.

Watching the video, it is definitely "not your Grandfather's Moon landing"

I agree simulation will help the actual missions go smoother, but, frankly "not your grandfather's......... (whatever)" is pretty insulting to the current gen of grandfathers, since as young men, quite a few did some pretty awesome stuff (like landing on the moon, developing silicon chips etc), and amazing as the simulations might be, the current crowd has yet to land themselves on the moon, it's easier said than actually done.

Did you watch the video?

There is nothing insulting about the title. i remember the Apollo missions quite well - and today's missions are nothing like these early pioneers' missions

No I didn't, been to busy to look at the video yet, but you are right about today's mission's being nothing like the early pioneer missions -- they haven't even gotten to the moon yet, let alone landed!

You might consider watching it
- it's only about 50 minutes long

What they are doing today with GPU compute will be the basis for the future exploration of the solar system and beyond. And they will make it; whether next year or not, remains to be seen. But no life will be lost if they fail.