SpaceX launches Axiom’s fourth commercial manned mission to ISS
SpaceX last night successfully launched Axiom’s fourth commercial manned mission to ISS, dubbed Ax-4, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The first stage completed its second flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral. The Dragon capsule, the newest and fifth ship in SpaceX’s fleet of manned capsule, was dubbed “Grace,” as announced by Axiom mission commander and former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson. The three paying passengers are government astronauts from India, Hungary, and Poland.
The capsule will dock with ISS tomorrow (Thursday) at 7 am (Eastern), where it and its crew will spend about one to two weeks before returning to Earth.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
79 SpaceX
35 China
8 Rocket Lab
7 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 79 to 58.
The overall lack of excitement about this manned space mission speaks directly to how successful SpaceX has become as a private commercial rocket company. Its rockets and capsules work routinely well, with almost no problems, making these manned space missions seem as boring as an airline trip from New York to Washington.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
SpaceX last night successfully launched Axiom’s fourth commercial manned mission to ISS, dubbed Ax-4, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The first stage completed its second flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral. The Dragon capsule, the newest and fifth ship in SpaceX’s fleet of manned capsule, was dubbed “Grace,” as announced by Axiom mission commander and former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson. The three paying passengers are government astronauts from India, Hungary, and Poland.
The capsule will dock with ISS tomorrow (Thursday) at 7 am (Eastern), where it and its crew will spend about one to two weeks before returning to Earth.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
79 SpaceX
35 China
8 Rocket Lab
7 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 79 to 58.
The overall lack of excitement about this manned space mission speaks directly to how successful SpaceX has become as a private commercial rocket company. Its rockets and capsules work routinely well, with almost no problems, making these manned space missions seem as boring as an airline trip from New York to Washington.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Well, I stayed up to watch. After Mission Commander Peggy Whitson gave her speech after the launch, the other three gave speeches in their own languages, so I can only assume that they were saying good things about their mission, too, rather than complain about the noise and vibration of launch or that they had itchy noses from the moment that they closed their visors for launch.
The excitement was that they had some difficulty uploading weather information to Dragon for the abort programs, and if they didn’t solve the problem before it was time to arm the abort system then they would have to scrub the launch before fueling began. The upload problem was solved and the upload completed just in time to save the launch. I swear, if it had been a movie, there would have been tense music and lots of camera shots of worried faces and desperate ground controllers. It was almost like solving problems at the last minute is routine. Maybe SpaceX needs to take lessons from Hollywood to make their launches more exciting and worth watching.
I’d like to watch the docking, but then I would have to get up at an ungodly hour. It is yet another event that seems uneventful, even when a Starliner is having massive thruster problems and may strand its astronauts in space forever. Again, no music, no tense faces, no desperate ground controllers finding a solution at the last minute (reset the thruster controller, similar to “SCE to Aux”).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSN4MIsP_90 (4 minutes)
99+% of the drama at SpaceX now comes from the Starship side of the company. Falcon 9 has long since settled into metronomic near perfection. But we should not disparage dull and boring as an accomplishment in space launch. It’s definitely an accomplishment.
Has Musk or Shotwell sent anyone from Falcon to the Starship side of thing
One of the individuals I used to quarrel with over at NSF was Jim (Byeman/Charlie Murphy)–James Knauf judging from a rosy article about the Delta II upon its last days at The Space Review.
He is one of the most unpleasant, short-tempered individuals with usually curt responses and an acid tongue.
I *love* him for that.
When I called Delta II a crutch it set his teeth on edge. Once there was a typo (a decimal point shoved far, far over), I joked that if Hillary had her way, she’d spend a half trillion buying 10,000 weather sats all atop Delta IIs.
His response?
“What’s wrong with that?
At TSR, he said there is still room for expendables–where Mr. Eagleson said only missile weapons were where that was true.
He reminds me of the Star Trek TNG’s Jellico. And he really needs a few million to go to Boca.
Now Richard M talked about how ULA guys laughed at early SpaceX when they were at the dirt pile.
I don’t think Jim even knows how to smile.
Sending an Old Spacer like him to Boca might ruin the magical mojo that allowed the early SpaceX to go from dirt to orbit.
SuperHeavy seems alright for the most part.
I just don’t get the deal with Starship.
This has to be a cultural thing–I cannot think of anything else it could be.
Jeff,
I find Jim at NSF to not be a useful commenter. His one word responses are virtually all negative and wrong often enough to make them unreliable. His confidence seriously outstrips his accuracy.
As for Starship, there are things in that operation that don’t pencil out on the business side. On the technical side, they are too deep in not to stay the course.. I remember the X-33, X-34, and several other programs that were axed after megabucks spent but before first flight.
Starship has the major advantage that the development funding does not come from people worried about the optics for the next election. I.E. Not flying is okay as the JOBs are preserved but having any kind of in flight problem is years in recovery.
John hare wrote: “As for Starship, there are things in that operation that don’t pencil out on the business side. On the technical side, they are too deep in not to stay the course.. I remember the X-33, X-34, and several other programs that were axed after megabucks spent but before first flight.”
We know that Starship can make it to reentry and landing. What is happening now is that SpaceX is working on more optimization, and discovering where their ideas do not work as well as expected.
As for X-33, X-34, and DC-X, it seems that the companies involved were not as serious as SpaceX is. All three companies relied upon NASA for some portion of funding, and when NASA funding dried up, so did their interest in the projects. It isn’t that SpaceX is too deep in to change course (are you suggesting a sunk-cost fallacy?), it is that the company is on a mission, and they are so serious about it that they started Starlink to make sure that funding would continue all the way to the goal line.
Jeff Wright,
Most of the former Falcon engineering staff have long since been reassigned to Starship. The Falcons are mature systems and no longer require much fresh engineering. I talked to a SpaceX software engineer back before even the decision to switch from carbon fiber to stainless steel had been made. He was still working on Dragon, but his former boss had already been reassigned to Starship and he wasn’t alone. The engineers still working on the Falcons are, I suspect, mainly the production engineers, who still need to continue coming up with ways to increase production cadence on Falcon 2nd stages, for example.
The operations people are still mostly Falcon-centric and will stay that way until Starship reaches a decent launch cadence.
Starship’s problems are not cultural. The SpaceX culture at Starbase is the same culture as that in Hawthorne and at all of SpaceX’s other sites. Starship has just encountered a series of teething problems that will be gotten past just as SpaceX earlier did with Falcon 1, F9 booster recovery, CRS-7, AMOS-6 and the ground explosion of the first Crew Dragon. Stuff happens on major engineering projects that push envelopes and are also being developed at maximum speed. There are numerous examples from the WW2 era, notably the Manhattan Project and the development of the B-29. Later, the X-plane projects were not exactly glitch-free nor were the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and Shuttle programs.
john hare,
I’m not sure what you think “doesn’t pencil out” on Starship’s business side. Starship is currently in an entirely capital consumption phase. It isn’t bringing in a dime of revenue so every expense falls directly to the project’s fire-engine-red bottom line. Starship won’t even begin paying back its development ante until it starts deploying the big Starlink sats. At that point, and not before, there will be a “business side” about which useful comments can be made. Until then, Starlink-as-she-stands appears to be bringing in more than enough money to keep Starbase’s lights on and parking lots full.