Worlds Without End Blog

We’ll keep that up all day and night. I’m told the pod bay doors will be opened around 3AM (thankfully, not by HAL). Stay Tuned!

For those of you who who don’t know what this is: SpaceX is performing it’s second (and coolest, thus far) test flight, which is the first flight to actually DO something. It’s delivering a bunch of cargo to the International Space Station. We figure this makes it official: Commercial space flight is no longer science fiction, as of today! As of this writing, the Canadian-built robotic arm has just clamped onto Dragon (the name of the SpaceX capsule), thus ensuring that it will not fly out into space. Some time in the wee hours of the morning (5AM eastern time), is when the ISS astronauts plan to open the capsule and get to the sweet sweet honey, inside.

Why will it take so long for docking to be complete? Is that normal?

Nevermind. Just read a bunch about it. And it’s technically not docking, it’s a berthing. Very cool stuff.

I would imagine it’s because they want to collect data concerning what happens at every little step in the process…measure air pressure, seal leakage, etc. This is a test flight, after all.

I watched Destination Moon recently, in which R. Heinlein (around 1950) has space exploration being funded by patriotic (!) private corporations. It took the resources of government to actually get it going in the real world, so it will be fascinating to see how things develop as commercial motives come to the forefront…