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quade

Dragon 2 Unveiling by Elon Musk

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In case you missed it, this is amazing.

It's the new crew capsule from SpaceX with powered descent (parachutes as backup). Link includes animation showing all stages of usage.

http://www.spacex.com/webcast/

And the interior . . . beautiful. Really, just amazing.

High res photos here;
http://www.spacex.com/gallery/dragon-v2
quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

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I'm not entirely certain I understand the question.

SpaceX is a privately funded company. It will be selling launches to whoever wants to buy them. My guess is to stay competitive they will have to be less expensive than what people pay the Russians, who are currently the only players in the game. Right now if you want to go to the ISS, you have to buy space on the Russian launches. This includes NASA.

NASA will be the major purchaser of seats on the Dragon 2 launches to the ISS and I think all-in-all that's still a pretty good deal even if for some bizarre reason it ended up costing slightly more than dealing with Russia since the money would be staying in the US. That said, I'm nearly 100% certain the entire point is to be not just a little less expensive than the Russians, but a hell of a lot less expensive.

Additionally, the Russia capsules hold three people, while this can hold seven. The Russian capsules are +30-year-old 47-year-old technology. They might as well be steam powered and pretty much looks like they are. Dragon 2 is . . . incredible. Absolute state of the art, well beyond anything NASA is doing as far as manned space flight is concerned.
quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

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quade

***Interesting, though not surprising, to see it using APAS rather than CBM.



APAS is the international standard for manned space flight; isn't it?

"The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from." -Andrew Tanenbaum

Dragon v1, Cygnus, HTV, and the US orbital segment modules use CBM.

STS, Dragon v2, and Zarya, use APAS (as did Apollo-Soyuz and Shuttle-Mir)

ATV, Progress, and Soyuz use a Salyut probe and drogue

Most of the Russian segment is held together with a hybrid of the APAS and Salyut systems

The Chinese use a home-brewed APAS look-alike on their spacecraft.

To make matters worse, NASA cooked up another "standard" called NDS which will result in stacked adapters in two locations on the ISS (CBM to APAS then APAS to NDS)

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