I don’t remember NASA mentioning anything like that - either at the briefing I’ve just come across, or any other time they’ve talked about it.

So my guess is that they didn’t bother. Just hoping that whatever could cause the crew to have to return to Earth in a hurry wouldn’t also cause any problems with the cabin air in Dragon. (Problems like … there not being any! Or it being filled with smoke, or ammonia.)

Perhaps they would’ve gone with your plan if they’d had all the necessary equipment.

Can’t find it though.

Those 4 little words haunted me.

I’ve been searching non-stop this whole time, every waking hour ;) And I’ve finally found it! At last my life can get back to normal ;)

https://www.youtube.com/live/rJghQoIyH8Y?t=21m14s

I think NASA released a photo of the makeshift seats. Probably around the time they were dismantled, after Crew-9 had arrived. Can’t find it though.

I find the defendant not guilty! I think the NSF guy’s idea involved replacing the woman & her arms and the daughter with the tower & “chopstick” arms, and a Super Heavy rocket booster (which is in the process of being caught by the arms). Something like that?

The closest I’ve seen is this. Not great!

So I tried getting Chat GPT to do a better one for me. This did not go well 😂 But surely someone with experience should be able to cajole a suitable generative AI tool to do a good job of it?

One of my favourite videos of the catch, because of what happens when the sonic booms arrive!: https://youtu.be/749dRxbSkVU (They’re at 6:51.) Also it’s a different angle from most of the others, because it’s from Mexico.

And a playlist: Starship IFT5 booster catch, original footage only

You heard it on Lemmy first!: https://sh.itjust.works/post/25840892 (very soon after Stich first mentioned it)

Link currently doesn’t WFM.

I believe when you create a clip from an ongoing YouTube live stream, it will (at best) only work as long as the footage you selected is still available on the stream. And I believe YouTube only keeps the most recent 12 hours of footage.

(What they should do is create a permanent copy of the relevant footage, assuming the channel owner permits it.)

The fairing looks spotless. I guess they’re using a new one, at least partly for reasons of cleanliness? (Planetary protection and all that.)

With boosters we’re at the point where “flight proven” is no longer just a euphemism for “second hand”. I’ve felt that way myself for a few years. And NASA basically confirmed they agree a couple of months ago, when the brand new booster intended for Crew-9 was given a Starlink mission first, increasing confidence in it after a minor problem during transport. (IIRC)

But I’m not sure if we’re at that point with fairings. Or even if we’ll ever be.

Is it the end of days if NASA goes without a low-Earth orbit space station for several months or even years? One key commercial space official at the space agency, Phil McAlister, suggested that maybe it wouldn’t be.

He’s right, and I hate him for it :)

Expedition 1 arrived at the International Space Station on 2000-11-02. That’s 59-and-a-bit days before[1] the start of the 21st Century. So whatever disappointments people may have about the 21st Century compared to their expectations, at least we can (currently) say there has been a continuous human presence in outer space for the entirety of it. Pretty cool!

Strikingly, it could easily be the case that there will never again be a time with humans only living on Earth. If that’s because AGI kills us all in a decade, with any people in orbit / on the moon being the last to have their atoms repurposed, that’s not ideal. But if it’s because we spread out through the universe, and outlive our sun and even our galaxy, that could (potentially) be very cool indeed.

Perhaps everyone reading this either witnessed the start of, or was born during, humanity’s Second Age!

Or perhaps the current period of continuous off-Earth habitation will finish around 2030 and all my attempts at profundity were a waste of time! After all I’m not sure how much I’d want NASA to spend just to maintain it.

Of course, the ISS isn’t the only hope here. The Chinese space station might fill in any gaps after the ISS, although that would be a concern for other reasons (assuming China is still controlled by its communist party, with other parties banned). And then there’s the moon. The Artemis Program in its current form won’t bring about the start of a continuous presence on the moon by 2030. But I wouldn’t put it past SpaceX to shake things up in that regard.

[1] - If you thought the 21st Century started at the start of 2000, see this or even this.

What’s the ‘unique selling point’ of this compared to existing Earth re-entry systems? The parafoil giving 100 metre landing accuracy?

Were existing heavy duty systems all designed to ultimately be suitable for humans? And this? Could some future version be used for humans? If not, does ditching that criterion allow for massive efficiency improvements?

P.S. I thought they had a typo, but no. (Well, not really.) You learn something new every day.

I like SpaceX’s Sarah Walker, despite (or partly because of?) the fact that she tends not to answer questions from mere mortals (non-SpaceX / non-NASA personnel).

For example, at the Post-Launch News Conference, there was a question about pulsive splashdown (although that term was not used).

She seemed to imply that the capability would have been available for Crew-7 if it wasn’t for a problem with one of the GPS sensors. (Was this problem known about well in advance of undocking? Would that be why they didn’t announce the new capability at the time?)

She spent most of the time confirming the point I made in my first comment on this post, about taking into account any extra risks that this capability might add, and she said that it had taken “years”.

She didn’t answer whether it’s available if the parachutes fail during a launch abort, nor tell us any of the (non-NASA) missions it has been active for (of which Gerst had said there were “several”).

Here’s the question: https://www.youtube.com/live/wwhfph1vGdE?t=32m30s (at 32:30)

When composing the title of this post I nearly called this technique ‘Propulsive Splashdown’, but I didn’t remember ever hearing that term used before. (Stitch didn’t call it that, did he?)

Later I heard Stephen Clark use that term in his question. And yesterday that term was used during the launch stream. Nail and Cardman spent a minute discussing the capability: https://www.youtube.com/live/SKXtysRx0b4?t=3h29m8s (from 3:29:08)

Apparently they often abbreviate it to “prop splash”.

Animation of a ‘land landing’: https://youtu.be/Cf_-g3UWQ04?t=1m32s

Not really. There’s a hover test vid uploaded in 2016 but they cheated. (It’s held up by a rope!)

Or you could play the first 17 seconds of the pad abort test in reverse …

At 52:05, Stephen Clark asked about this. The start of Gerst’s answer is:

We’ve actually flown it on several other dragon flights before this. This is the first time it flies on a NASA mission.

So, perhaps Inspiration 4? Presumably Polaris Dawn? And I guess the Axiom missions are being counted as non-NASA in this context, so some of those?

Before doing something like this I think you should ensure that it reduces the overall risk to the crew. So you’d need to have an estimate of how likely it is that all the parachutes fail, and how likely it is that the SuperDracos could save lives in that situation, but also an estimate of how likely this capability is to go wrong. For example, could there be a bug in the software or in some sensor(s), that causes the SuperDracos to fire when they weren’t needed? Would the SuperDracos otherwise be in an inactive state during re-entry, and if so, what are the risks of having them active? Etc…

Those 2 sentences from Gerstenmaier suggest to me that SpaceX had already decided that, on balance, this capability should be enabled. Whereas NASA have only just reached that conclusion.