Dream Chaser takes its first test flight Sierra Nevada Corporation's air tests of its Dream Chaser crew vehicle would normally have received top billing this week had they not been slightly overshadowed by all the (admittedly historic) Dragon hoopla. According to an article at Parabolic Arc (with great video), residents of Jefferson County near Denver were treated to the sight of a Sikorsky Sky Crane flying the Dream Chaser test hardware above the Broomfield airport on Tuesday. The tests were being done in anticipation of Dream Chaser's Free Flight Tests later this year. SNC announced yesterday that Dream Chaser had completed four more of its CCDev2 (Commercial Crew Development Round 2) milestones. The four milestones included testing of the Separation System that releases Dream Chaser from its Atlas V booster, Main Landing Gear Drop Testing, Captive Carry Interface Testing, and the captive carry flight test readiness review, the carrying aircraft in this case being the sky crane. Evidently after the Captive Carry FTRR Sierra Nevada didn't waste any time getting the bird into the air. Dream Chaser will soon complete its 18 milestones for this round of NASA's Commercial Crew competition. The last test is an optional Milestone 19, a free flight from a carrier aircraft. The reusable Dream Chaser has the unique ability to return injured astronauts at low accelerations back from a space station. The spacecraft is a reincarnation of NASA's HL-20 crew vehicle, repackaged with SNC's hybrid rocket system and modernized electronics. Dream Chaser has blown through its milestones fairly quickly, garnering fans not only for its safety and reusability, but also for its mini-Shuttle-like appearance. link
We'll just have to agree to disagree there. The main impetus to finding venture capital funding for those things is that each one (with the possible exception antibiotics) - Spawned multi-billion dollar industries that nobody could've envisioned - Took decades to fully mature - Took huge amounts of initial investment I really doubt even the smartest, most risk-prone venture capitalist would've invested in anything that required massive startup funding with no ROI for 20-30 years. I don't necessarily think the government is qualified either. Maybe they ought to hire venture capitalists to make better decisions for them. Who knows? The solution IMHO isn't to stop the government from investing in ideas altogether...but invest in better/smarter ones. Governments and venture capitalists have two different goals. Governments are more likely to take a chance on ideas that improve quality-of-life regardless of ROI. For venture capitalists, ROI is the whole point and improving quality-of-life almost inconsequential.
SpaceX resets CRS-6 space station launch to April 13 with booster landing attempt The clock is ticking towards the next launch of a SpaceX cargo vessel to the International Space Station (ISS) hauling critical supplies to the six astronauts and cosmonauts serving aboard, that now includes the first ever 'One-Year Mission'station crew comprising NASA's Scott Kelly and Russia's Mikhail Kornienko. The mission, dubbed SpaceX CRS-6 (Commercial Resupply Services-6) will also feature the next daring attempt by SpaceX to recover the Falcon 9 booster rocket through a precision guided soft landing onto an ocean-going barge. link
Commodore is just pissed that everything he uses is based on public research, from the search engine he used to get here, to the Internet he's using to communicate (a CERN research project), to the energy he's about to get (fracking is based on federal research) to the screen he is probably using (fundamental physics research).
private capital making spectacular innovations without any help DOESN'T HAPPEN. Name me any of the 21st century's greatest "advances" and I will provide you with the layer of public research or open collaboration it is based on.
Given how much government money is flowing into just about every corner of the economy, I'm not sure it would even be possible for something to be invented without some (at least indirect) government funding contributing.
They hit the barge in the first landing -- the first one hit the target hard and the second was scrubbed because of heavy seas, but still landed soft very close to the target. This is a really exciting launch -- if the seas are calm I expect they will come very close to a soft landing -- if they could do this on land we'd probably already have success.
Too bad we didn't recognize the warning signs in 2012. Space X joining up with ISIS is horrible news. Thanks Obama.
http://www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/econ_stat/en/economics/wipr/pdf/wipr_2011_chapter4.pdf The public sector funds the majority of basic research. That's not an issue of "focus of funds", it's an issue that private markets have little incentive to get their hands dirty paying for public research because the time horizons are too long for year-to-year income statements and if you patented every basic innovation to death you'd have no innovation on top of innovation--which is what powers 95% of the changes to the web. The web itself was based on public research.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1B6oiLNyKKI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> They did it.
"The primary mission of the liftoff of the SpaceX Falcon 9 – in a newly enhanced upgraded configuration – is to carry a payload of eleven small commercial communications satellites for Orbcomm on the second OG2 mission." The secondary test objective of SpaceX is to land the Falcon 9 rockets first stage on land by a propulsive soft landing for the first time in history at SpaceX’s Landing Zone 1, a few miles south of launch pad 40 at Cape Canaveral. link
Their success rate is **** and reusable engines proved cost prohibitive in the shuttle. Just give Musk the money to get to Mars. 19 billion a year to fly in ****ing circles. What a waste.
I missed this gem :grin: I'm guessing anything created by Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, Ford, Edison, Tesla, Einstein, Ramanujan, etc are examples of this as well. Do penicillin, RSA encryption (MIT patented it), Bell Labs, quantum mechanics, etc count as public research or open collaboration? I guess you can argue that since Gottingen is a public university then that means the government collaborated with the scientists during their golden age and discovery of quantum mechanics, but it was also the government of Nazis that destroyed it as well. Anyhow, space exploration/development has gained a massive boost from private enterprise taking the lead in recent years. Of course you can find technologies that were created from government ventures, but private enterprise has been far more innovative, creative, and cost effective...as we have seen from SpaceX. And Obama finally made it legal for US private companies to mine asteroids. How ****ing awesome is that going to be?
No. SpaceX just delivered a payload into orbit and landed the first stage. Jeff Bezos launched a rocket into low earth orbit and landed it a month or two ago. While what Bezos did was certainly impressive, it's nothing compared to what just happened.
