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Triumph of the Private Sector in Space
Two astronauts in their Crew Dragon capsule (made by SpaceX) successfully returned from the International Space Station, gently splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico, at 2:48 p.m. Sunday. This was a historic mission, and went flawlessly. The capsule was recovered by a SpaceX ship in about an hour and a half. The astronauts got to the ISS powered by a SpaceX Falcon9 rocket in late May.
Cheer for the spirit of Free Markets and Free People!
Published in Science & Technology
Did they bring back t-shirts for everyone?
If only! I’m pretty sure there wasn’t much room in the capsule. They did bring back a toy dinosaur named Tremor, belonging to their kids.
Possibly the most unabashedly free enterprise science fiction movie ever made, and one of the first, period: Robert Heinlein’s Destination: Moon, 1950. American private industry reaches space when the government won’t do it. Left wing agitators try to get the Feds to shut down the program. “Demand Action from Federal Authorities. Atmosphere Poisoned?”
(The more things change, the more they stay the same: note that a secondary headline is “Trouble at the Border!”
“I went to ISS and all I got was this stupid t-shirt”
Hurrah for Elon Musk, despite his personality quirks. Hey, that reminds me of another arch capitalist with personality quirks who people think is craaaaazy.
Meanwhile, NASA is busy supporting Congressional sponsors and the government industrial complex.
It’s an evolutionary step. And a good excuse to re-read Heinlein’s “The Man Who Sold the Moon.”
Hmmmn…
Forty-eight years earlier.
I heard there is a geocache hidden up there; I hope one of them took the opportunity to find one not many people have found!
I am sooooo thankful for their safe return!
I think they need to do a better job of security! What’s with all the looky-loos surrounding the capsule!!
Actually thought that was pretty fun to see, as long as no danger to the spaceguys and themselves.
Oh, but they could have been Russians trying to kidnap them!! ;-)
Yeah, but there’s no science there; it’s a bunch of Parisian chorus girls launching a craft into a whipped cream Moon. Same with Flash Gordon. Yes, even the same for H.G. himself with his Things to Come (1936), which also has a space launch. Destination: Moon is different. It’s as realistic as late Forties science and engineering could make it. It was the first film that showed audiences that you could float around in space, that there’s no air out there and you’d need a vacuum-proof suit, that a rocket doesn’t push against the outside air, that a spaceship could land on its tail, that it would take a couple of days to get to the Moon.
It was also realistic in less scientific ways: it acknowledged that space travel was going to be very, very expensive, that constructing a ship would take a while, and that politics would interfere with it. Heinlein also wrote the kind of juvenile stories where a stern-but-wacky old prof builds a spaceship out of space parts in his barn. But the obvious model of the launch project in Destination: Moon is the Manhattan Project.
Actually, Destination: Moon has one earlier rival, but it’s a silent movie from Germany: The Woman in the Moon (1929). It’s got a couple of great moments. The big ship’s rollout is almost modern looking. There’s a countdown, the first ever on film. And the rocket “stages”, like a real one.
On the other hand, in Frau Im Mond, the Moon has an atmosphere, so people go running around without protective gear, and the “secret” is, they discover gold on the surface! Providing a justification for continued space flight.
That is, I’d suppose, until the availability of cheap lunar gold crashes the Earthly gold market for a mineral that’s no longer scarce.
Those pesky little unintended consequences.
Greatest photobomb. Apologies for the quality.
You make that sound like a bad thing.
First space thing I’ve watched since 1986 when I saw the Challenger explode.
So relieved everything went well.
No danger to the astronauts, but the Dragon’s maneuvering and landing rockets use hypergolic propellants, one of which is nitrogen tetroxide, which is extremely poisonous. Some knucklehead in a speedboat might drive into a plume of that stuff and never notice it. A day later he’s as likely as not to drop dead. We learned that the hard way in some Titan II silos.