Cargo Dragon splashes down and is recovered successfully
A SpaceX cargo Dragon capsule was recovered successfully earlier today after it splashed down off the coast of California.
The spacecraft carried back to Earth about 6,700 pounds of supplies and scientific experiments designed to take advantage of the space station’s microgravity environment after undocking at 12:05 p.m., May 23, from the zenith port of the space station’s Harmony module.
Some of the scientific hardware and samples Dragon will return to Earth include MISSE-20 (Multipurpose International Space Station Experiment), which exposed various materials to space, including radiation shielding and detection materials, solar sails and reflective coatings, ceramic composites for reentry spacecraft studies, and resins for potential use in heat shields. Samples were retrieved on the exterior of the station and can improve knowledge of how these materials respond to ultraviolet radiation, atomic oxygen, charged particles, thermal cycling, and other factors.
Other cargo returned included a robot hand that tested its grasping and handling capabilities in weightlessness, as well as other experiments.
The capsule itself spent three months in orbit after launching at the end of April.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
A SpaceX cargo Dragon capsule was recovered successfully earlier today after it splashed down off the coast of California.
The spacecraft carried back to Earth about 6,700 pounds of supplies and scientific experiments designed to take advantage of the space station’s microgravity environment after undocking at 12:05 p.m., May 23, from the zenith port of the space station’s Harmony module.
Some of the scientific hardware and samples Dragon will return to Earth include MISSE-20 (Multipurpose International Space Station Experiment), which exposed various materials to space, including radiation shielding and detection materials, solar sails and reflective coatings, ceramic composites for reentry spacecraft studies, and resins for potential use in heat shields. Samples were retrieved on the exterior of the station and can improve knowledge of how these materials respond to ultraviolet radiation, atomic oxygen, charged particles, thermal cycling, and other factors.
Other cargo returned included a robot hand that tested its grasping and handling capabilities in weightlessness, as well as other experiments.
The capsule itself spent three months in orbit after launching at the end of April.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
You never hesitate to announce that SLS / Orion is a waste of money (it is) but announce “zero gravity science” from the ISS like it isn’t also absurd snake oil.
“Zero Gravity science” aka torturing astronauts for fun and profit.
We know the effects of zero g for long periods, not good. For short periods no problem.
Now do 0.16 g and 0.38 g.
Send up two starships, launch a connecting hub with a despinable docking port and two 310 foot long cables on a Falcon 9. Rendezvous, connect them together and slow spin at 1 and a quarter RPM, the connected Starships on a 310 foot long radius cable to 0.16 g.
Dock a Crew Dragon and have the 4 person crew hang out for a month. Then do two months, 3 months and finally 6 months.
Remove crew, undock, despin and send the 2 starships home for restocking..
Now repeat at 0.38 g and go right to 6 months since the low g missions worked out the kinks. Yeah, you’ll end up at 1.9 RPM to get the 0.38 g but, OK
Now you are doing life science that matters.
I don’t like messing with cables outside of rotorvators..
Starship could launch one Skylab like craft—and maybe this at least.
Telepresence in a ring station controls science in a microgravity platform.
Repairs are a walk—not a launch—away.
In terms of cables—here is where big expendable upper stages prove their worth.
Spin up your craft…tethered to a big wet stage.
Spin rapidly at great length—release upper stage.
This might allow an inclination change.
Fire another cable into asteroid…cables used to cut more solid metal asteroids like how a cable cut the Kursk submarine.
Asteroids will need tether lines…cinch in with cable behind you, asteroid in front.
That allows an astronaut or Teslanaut to *bear down* and do work.
It could, and indeed this is basically the plan with Starlab. One big space station module, and only one — and launched by Starship. And in fact, Starlab will be even bigger by diameter – 8 meters versus 6.61 meters for Skylab.
The bigger question, though, and the one commercial space station developers and their would-be investors are asking, is not whether Starship can launch their stations, but whether they can actually close a business case once it does.
I don’t normally recommend videos, but one of the most compelling and informed space channels out there now is Eager Space, and his new video this week is relevant in this regard, “Why free fliers beat space stations.” He makes a credible case that it’s hard to see that anyone *can* make a business case that closes for a space station. He even “steelmans” the assumption to the contrary by taking the most promising and aggressive commercial station developer, Vast, as his case study. The short version is, he concludes that, until and unless transportation costs dramatically drop (or a government agency simply underwrites the bulk of the cost of development and operation), it’s going to be far easier to reach profit by operating a “free-flier” (i.e., a crew vehicle like Crew Dragon) than it will be a space station; and for customers simply wanting to do long-term microgravity research, an unmanned vehicle like Varda is going to be a better bet (lower cost, with none of the vibrations and other issues that come with humans on board).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v58M3TcrP2g
Myself, I am not quite clear that he is taking an adequate look at the “sovereign” client market. If a station developer like Vast or Starlab really can sign a long-term (at least a few years) set of government space agency or or agencies as anchor tenants to fill up most of their manifest, then I think it’s possible it could be operated in the black. You’d no longer be dependent on having to find so many Jared Isaacmans or Chun Wangs to get enough paid man-days on your station on an ongoing basis to reach reliable profitability. But I admit, that’s yet to be demonstrated — so far.
But even so, it may be the case that a free-flier Starship could be the only viable option for a genuinely (i.e., not heavily subsidized) commercial crew orbital capability on any real scale or duration.
I was under assumption that Columbus was going to be a free-flyer, as in an ISS module that seldom remained docked–but someone (I forgot whom) said that was wasn’t the case.
I think stations need state support. VCs are just too risk averse.
I can’t prove this–but it is my guess that the best RLVs need to be built out of materials grown in microgravity…to Earth FROM orbit.
So we may have a Catch-22 situation
I would prefer a station to be cold soaked as opposed to something that has to to face re-entry.
One of the outstanding problems with long-term manned spaceflight is what happens to the human body at lower than normal “G” loadings. Happily, there are only three datapoints necessary – 1 G, 1/3 G and 1/6 G, which touch all the relevant bodies in the solar system. Figure out a Variable Gravity Facility (VGF) which combines 2 of the 3 and you can get some serious work done, specifically: what “G” loading turns all the pathologies associated with long term exposure to ZG on and off?
Being a tether aficionado, tethers don’t bother me a lot. Others, your mileage may (and likely will) vary. But now that we are about to have large caliber structures available to sling around one another, and are actively considering years long transit times, it is long past time to actually ask the question and see if there are reproducible answers. I expect we will find a “G” level that turns the negative “G” response on and off. While I hope it is somewhere to below 1/3 “G” (Mars), I am entirely comfortable if the actual answer is anything below 1 “G”. Lots of work left to do. Cheers –
I think you may be the victim of poor nomenclature on the part of the European Space Agency, Jeff. Originally, back in the 1980’s, Columbus was planned to be what ESA called a “Man-Tended Free Flyer (MTFF).” Columbus would have been a small, single module that would be attached to a service module which would handle power and station-keeping, and it would be visited from time to time by ESA astronauts on their Hermes crew vehicle.
But “free flyer” is somewhat of a misnomer here. ESA seemed to mean by the phrase merely that it wouldn’t be part of some larger station. But Eager Space uses the more common meaning now, which is just a crew vehicle that launches up to orbit and then returns.
Hermes went bust, of course, at about the same time that Freedom was reaching its final configuration. ESA ended up redesigning Columbus to be an integral module on the station, which became the International Space Station in 1993.
If ESA ends up making a serious commitment to Starlab, it could function for them in a sort of way as what Columbus was originally intended to be. Instead of Hermes, they would have Dragon to access it with crew (being a commercial vehicle, it could be an easier pill to swallow than a NASA owned vehicle); and perhaps Nyx to supply cargo. Now, I doubt that ESA is in a position to commit enough man-days to Starlaball by themselves to get it in the black. But they might make a solid anchor tenant, such that Voyager Technologies doesn’t have to dig up so many other customers to fill up the manifest.
I was wondering if anyone in the know could answer this question.
As for both Dragon capsules. If they use the drako landing rockets why can they not land on land? I know people will say no landing legs. But if they HAVE TOO (emergency)could they just land and allow the heat shield to crumple and absorb the last of the impact?
Its not like they plan on using the heat shield again. They could even redesign it to have a crumple zone, just in case.
And as for a tether system to create artificial gravity.
I am not a fan to tethers in general. If both ends do not react exactly the same they can not be spun up or slowed down to change gravity.
The idea is possible but I would design it to finally operate at 1g with 1rpm.
A central spool system and enough cable to let each end out about 1500 feet.
If the whole system started from a central position it would only have to spin up to about 5.5rpm’s and could then tether out to 1500ft on each side of the central module to keep 1g.
I am not a fan of the idea. But it could work.
I would prefer a ring station that would not have to change speed and would last years for real long term science and production. Cost more but would work for 50 years or more.
A follow-up on space station business: The Czech Republic Intends to Send National Astronaut to Space on Future Axiom Mission.
https://www.axiomspace.com/news/czech-republic-national-astronaut
It’s just one astronaut and one mission, which does not make for a manifest. But it’s a data point for interest of sovereign states in commercial space stations, I suppose.
Richard M: Um, I posted this story on May 24th. See: Axiom signs deals with Egypt and the Czech Republic