
US space companies prepare for space station docking - ColinWright
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17541345
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ErrantX
This is great.

Interestingly, a capitalist economy might be provoking a modern version of the
space race - i.e. companies competing to meet the contracts push hard on
development and testing to win. Orbital's language in this article, for
example, is very competitive.

This is cool; it's how we progressed to space so quickly in the first place
after all.

Also:

 _The Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, or MARS, to give the launch site its
proper name,_

Someone at NASA has a sense of humour :D

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hencq
Indeed. I find it interesting that the (first) space race was very much rooted
in the Cold War and as such a race between ideologies; Capitalism vs
Communism. Yet, both sides used similar structures, i.e. state driven
bureaucracies to get to space. Which seems - from an ideological standpoint -
to fit much better with Communism. In a way, having companies compete to get
into space is way overdue. Exciting times!

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warpspeed
I haven't yet seen an article that I feel really shows how much is riding on
these missions. This first interaction between private and public space
agencies represents passing the torch to the next chapter of space
exploration. If either of these guys drop the torch (i.e. smash into the ISS),
it's going to be a serious setback for privatization, and without funding for
a public alternative we will probably end up watching China or Russia take the
lead as the dominant space-faring country.

~~~
mturmon
There's a note in the article that the docking will proceed autonomously. I
understood that SpaceX has people working on computer vision for autonomous
docking, which I think is farther along than NASA is.

