According to the timeline from the last NAC, DM-s's Dragon should have had capsule completion yesterday, and be undergoing integration with the trunk today. Have there been any rumblings of delays to this timeline? I can't recall seeing any photos of that Dragon since August (prior to heatshield integration).
Quote from: edzieba on 03/04/2019 04:31 pmAccording to the timeline from the last NAC, DM-s's Dragon should have had capsule completion yesterday, and be undergoing integration with the trunk today. Have there been any rumblings of delays to this timeline? I can't recall seeing any photos of that Dragon since August (prior to heatshield integration). Do you mean DM-2?
Yep, I meant DM-2, that was a typo.Was the prop line temperature issue only identified post launch, or already known about and simply flown with mitigation for DM-1 (by capping max pulse duration IIRC)? It may have already been fixed for DM-2 during initial build if it was discovered early enough.
Hello,I am writing an article for my school newspaper and I mentioned the CCtCAP contracts. Am I correct in this paragraph about how the contracts work etc?"SpaceX’s Crew Dragon is derived from their Dragon spacecraft which currently delivers cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) under the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract awarded to SpaceX along with Orbital ATK (which is now part of Northrop Grumman) by NASA. The first CRS mission (CRS-1) launched to the ISS in 2012. Crew Dragon was developed as a result of SpaceX along with Boeing being awarded with the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contracts in 2014. The CCtCap contracts were given to the companies to build safe and low-cost spacecraft which could transport NASA astronauts from American soil to the ISS."
Quote from: edzieba on 03/05/2019 01:21 pmYep, I meant DM-2, that was a typo.Was the prop line temperature issue only identified post launch, or already known about and simply flown with mitigation for DM-1 (by capping max pulse duration IIRC)? It may have already been fixed for DM-2 during initial build if it was discovered early enough.The temperature issue was disclosed in the pre-launch briefings. It didn't sound like the issue was resolved yet.
Remember all those arguments about seat cost for commercial crew? Well, now we know! NASA has published a paper giving the separate costs for development and unit.https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20170008895.pdfE. Zapata, "An assessment of cost improvements in the NASA COTS/CRS program and implication for future NASA missions," AIAA Space 2017 Forum, Orlando FL, Sep. 2017.
That was discussed in multiple threads here in 2017.
Edit. Looking at the fine print, the Dragon 2 and CST-100 costs do not include the launcher cost, which will substantially increase the per seat cost.
This paper’s essential idea is that when NASA’s space exploration ambitions and cost inflation exceed the rate ofNASA budget growth over the long term, the result is ever-larger scale programs that stretch increasing effortsacross longer time spans and this distribution of funding causes increasing NASA irrelevance. With distance to amoving target increasing over time, hitting the target may be merely challenging today but impossibly difficulttomorrow. Reducing ambitions, aiming for closer targets, merely reinforces the irrelevance the new plan tries to avoidwhile creating unsustainable scenarios, programs stretched so far across time the low flight frequency calls intoquestion the ability to maintain competence and safety. Irrelevance is the likely loss of stakeholder interest as muchas a certainty of being overcome by events as planned results stretch beyond a generation. We propose a steadytransformation of NASA space exploration and operations funding towards more, smaller commercial / public-privatepartnerships, favoring those with strong non-government business cases, to increase the pace of NASA achievementsand avoid having most funding in projects with goals forever a generation away. A stakeholder should be able to beginand end at least one major program and see its goals achieved, and preferably more, within a single career, rather thanhanding off incomplete tasks to another generation with those goals still a generation away.