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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday April 08 2020, @05:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the to-infinity-and-beyond dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The date August 18, 2006, forever altered the trajectory of SpaceX.

On that day, NASA awarded SpaceX a contract to develop a service for delivering cargo to the International Space Station. This "Commercial Orbital Transportation Services" agreement would pay SpaceX $278 million to design and develop a spacecraft and rocket for this purpose—what became known as Cargo Dragon and the Falcon 9.

[...] Beginning in 2012, SpaceX flew its first cargo mission to the station. On Tuesday, Cargo Dragon completed its 20th and final flight to the station, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. (For future supply missions, SpaceX will use a modified version of Crew Dragon, which has 20 percent greater volume and twice as much powered locker capacity).

Over the last eight years, various Dragon spacecraft have spent a total of 547 days attached to the space station, flown more than 450,000kg of cargo to the space station, and returned more than 35,000kg of science experiments and other cargo back to Earth.

[...] By flying the Falcon 9 rocket regularly for NASA, SpaceX was then able to glean valuable data about the flight profile of the first stage returning through the atmosphere. Through this process, SpaceX tested concepts such as supersonic retropropulsion, which enabled the use of Falcon 9 engines to control the rocket's return to Earth. This experimentation led directly to both land-based and sea-based landings of the Falcon 9 rocket.

In 2014, at least partly because SpaceX was successfully delivering cargo to the space station, the company was awarded a contract to deliver astronauts as well. The first Crew Dragon mission carrying Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken is now likely to occur in late May or June. Moreover, late last month, a modified version of Dragon, known as XL, was awarded a contract to deliver cargo to lunar orbit in the mid-2020s.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday April 08 2020, @06:45PM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday April 08 2020, @06:45PM (#980332) Journal

    450 metric tons.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2020, @06:50PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2020, @06:50PM (#980335)

    The idea is to empesize the amount for dramatic effect. 450 somehow does not achieve this.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 09 2020, @01:20AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 09 2020, @01:20AM (#980467) Journal
      450,000,000,000,000,000 nanograms!!!!1!

      For bonus effect, it's nano.