

SpaceX Prepares For April 30 Launch To Space Station - bcl
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/03/spacex-prepares-for-april-30-launch-to-space-station/

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mpakes
As a former engineer on the Atlas V launch vehicle program, I'm so excited to
see the commercialization of spaceflight come to fruition. The latest
projections I've seen have the Dragon and Falcon 9 coming in at 20% of the
price of an equivalent Atlas V / Delta IV (EELV) launch. Comparative Non-
Recurring Engineering (NRE) costs are even lower than that. (I'd love if any
SpaceX employees can comment further on any of this with more detail.)

As I've seen firsthand, the waste in typical defense contractor programs is
obscene – it's so great to see someone doing something about it. Hopefully
with much lower cost to orbit, we'll see a revitalization of the commercial
launch market as well.

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pmorici
It's also worth mentioning that SpaceX is possibly even significantly cheaper
than their commercial competitors. If you look up the other company mentioned
in the article, Orbital Science Corporation it says they have a contract with
NASA for 8 launches for 1.9 Billion to do the same thing. SpaceX has a
contract for 1.6 Billion for 12 launches. That's 50% more flights for 15% less
cost.

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Retric
Do you have the Mass to LEO numbers for each of those?

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pmorici
I don't know what that means, but Wikipedia says that Space Science
Corporation's vehicle can cary a "2,000kg / 2700kg" "delivered payload" and
SpaceX's Dragon a 6,000kg "launch payload" so they win there too by more than
double.

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burgerbrain
Wikipedia has 9900kg to LEO for the Falcon 9 block 1 and 10450kg to LEO for
Falcon 9 block 2 (both from Canaveral).

To GTO those numbers are 2400kg and 4680kg.

The "Launch Payload" of the Dragon spacecraft (6000kg) appears to be
approximately the Mass to LEO of the block 2 (10450kg) minus the mass of an
empty Dragon spacecraft (4200kg).

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amirmansour
Been waiting for this. I did some embedded C programming for the docking of
the Dragon to the ISS two years ago as an intern. I wish them the best of
luck. Check out for updates on this: <http://www.spacex.com/updates.php>

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kleiba
They let interns program the docking to the ISS? Or is this supposed to be a
joke?

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maaku
Why wouldn't they? Seriously. When you get down to the nuts and bolts of it,
it's really rather boring, uninteresting, low-level stuff. At the same time,
it's major cool points on their resume that kids in their senior year of
college crave. Why shouldn't an intern do that?

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CWuestefeld
About 25 years ago I had a co-op job with a defense contractor, working on a
radar system for military aircraft. Part of the obstacle to having interns or
people like me do "real" work is the security bureaucracy. It's just not worth
the expense of going through the security checks for somebody who won't be
working there very long.

I remember working on a simulation of one aspect of the system. I wasn't
allowed to know the real operational parameters of the system, which makes
testing difficult. So when testing my code I could only guess, plugging in
numbers that seemed reasonable to me. Then I'd give my code to my team lead,
saying "I think it works now. Want to try it?".

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amirmansour
One thing about SpaceX is that there is no bureaucracy. If Elon Musk wasn't
busy talking to someone, I could have just walked into his office and chatted
with him.

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alexchamberlain
_SpaceX has a $1.6 billion contract for 12 cargo flights to the ISS._

And I thought shipping in the UK was expensive...

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ceejayoz
It would be, if standard procedure involved blowing up the delivery truck in
your driveway.

