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posted by martyb on Saturday May 30 2020, @05:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the LEO-is-not-just-the-name-of-a-lion dept.

[20200530_203823 UTC: UPDATE: Launch was successful, all systems nominal, first stage successfully landed on the drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You", and Ben and Doug are on their 19-hour flight to the ISS (International Space Station). Live coverage continues all the way through docking.]

Today's the day— weather permitting, America is returning to space:

During Wednesday's technically smooth countdown, NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken came within 17 minutes of launching before a scrub due to poor weather. Now the crew will suit up and try again on Saturday despite still iffy weather.

SpaceX is working toward an instantaneous launch at 3:22pm ET (19:22 UTC). The big concern again today is the development of thunderstorms near the launch site this afternoon, which could violate a number of weather criteria, including not just precipitation, but also residual electric energy from lighting in the atmosphere. Overall, the chance of acceptable weather at launch time is about 50 percent, forecasters estimate. They are also watching for down-range conditions in case an emergency abort is required during the rocket's ascent to space.

This is nothing new for NASA or U.S. human spaceflight. As the commander, Hurley, noted on Twitter Friday that his first space mission in 2009 scrubbed five times for weather or technical issues before it finally lifted off. "All launch commit criteria is developed way ahead of any attempt," Hurley said. "This makes the correct scrub or launch decision easier in the heat of the moment."

It has been such a long, long road for NASA and SpaceX to reach this moment—thousands of engineers and technicians have labored to design, develop, test, and fly hardware for the Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket over the last decade. But now the hardware and crew are ready, and at just the right time, to go fly.

[...] A combined NASA and SpaceX webcast will begin today at 11am ET (15:00 UTC).

Launch is scheduled for exactly 2 hours from the time this story goes live.

You can also join the discussion on channel #Soylent on IRC (Internet Relay Chat).

Link to the YouTube Live Stream.

National Weather Service Current Conditions and Forecast and Hourly Forecast Graph.

Interactive, real-time lightning map

Twitter feeds for NASA, SpaceX and Elon Musk.

Recently:
(2020-05-27) SpaceX to Launch Crew Demo 2; Weather Causes Today's Launch to be Scrubbed; Try Again Sat.
(2020-05-27) SpaceX Crew Dragon Demo-2 Launch Timeline
(2020-05-26) Spacex - Crew Dragon Demo 2 Launch - 2020-05-27 20:33 UTC (16:33 EDT)
(2020-05-13) SpaceX Crew Dragon Simulator Challenges You to Dock with the ISS, and It's Not Easy


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2020, @04:03PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2020, @04:03PM (#1001396)

    I find most the stuff you say pretty reasonable, but I have no idea where you're coming from on this one. These guys have all spent their entire lives building up their careers. If they back out, those careers are dead. They have 0 choice here. On the other hand, every single one of them was a military test pilot. And requirement #1 there absolutely is prioritizing adrenaline over safety. You get to test out the most cutting edge hardware there is, but the price you pay is one of life expectancy.

    So I do think they'll all fly on it, but these guys are all brilliant and I think there's 0 doubt they all also recognize that this is probably going to be one of the most dangerous missions they've ever taken on. Boeing's pad abort was a failure with only 2 of 3 of their chutes deploying under nominal conditions. They got NASA to call it a success and let them move on to a test flight. And that test flight was a complete and utter catastrophe in every single way imaginable short of the pod outright blowing (or burning) up. And even there they nearly got NASA to let them go straight to flying humans. Boeing has enough political clout to let them get through this while being held to a far lower standard than SpaceX is being held to and that's not good for anybody, but most of all - for these test pilots. They're putting their lives at risk to test second rate hardware that should have long since been scrapped.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday May 31 2020, @05:02PM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday May 31 2020, @05:02PM (#1001423) Journal

    They definitely have choices, and they can throw a wrench in the works and accept whatever consequences come. They aren't mindless adrenaline-seeking automatons and they would like to fly in a spacecraft that works. They themselves could probably squash Boeing's flight (which has already been postponed to 2021) by raising concerns, and they have a better chance of doing it now that SpaceX has been successful.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2020, @06:19PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2020, @06:19PM (#1001450)

      Were you just watching the news conference from the ISS by chance? You should be able to catch it by zooming through this [youtu.be] video at the tail end. I had a lot of hopes for Bridenstine and I do think at the beginning of his tenure that he was everything we need. But I have no idea how congress/Boeing does it, but they corrupt pretty much everybody. After this docking was completed flawlessly, he went on to praise this as the advent of the Artemis project, their partners for the moon program, and went on some babbling identity politics things before to finally conclude non-ironically stating that he's more popular than ever on Twitter and it's thanks to these astronauts. And that was literally his entire spiel. He mentioned SpaceX literally once, in passing.

      This is, with 0 hyperbole, one of the most important achievements in human spaceflight ever achieved primarily thanks to SpaceX, and it was Boeing + identity politics + I'm popular on Twitter. He's like an entirely different person and has absolutely checked out from everything and is just doing the real life equivalent of shit posting while peddling for Boeing. Even the astronauts seemed taken aback and were the ones repeatedly mentioning SpaceX. He managed to make Ted Cruz sound thoughtful and insightful, by contrast. No I definitely think speaking out, or really showing anything short of unadulterated love for Boeing, in this environment is as good as resigning.