Posted on 04/10/2022 1:06:37 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1) astronauts Michael Lopez-Alegria, Larry Connor, Eytan Stibbe, and Mark Pathy are now aboard the International Space Station following Crew Dragon’s hatch opening at 10:13 a.m. EDT, Saturday, April 9. It is the first mission with an entirely private crew to arrive at the orbiting laboratory.
After a journey of almost 21 hours, Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1) astronauts Michael Lopez-Alegria, Larry Connor, Eytan Stibbe, and Mark Pathy arrived at the International Space Station at 8:29 a.m. EDT Saturday, April 9. Crew Dragon Endeavour docked to the orbital complex while the spacecraft were flying about 260 miles above the central Atlantic Ocean.
Dragon Endeavour’s docking was delayed approximately 45 minutes as the space station teams, including mission controllers at NASA and SpaceX, worked to troubleshoot an issue preventing the crew members on station from receiving views from Dragon’s center line camera of the Harmony’s modules docking port. Mission teams worked to route video using a SpaceX ground station to the crew on the space station allowing Dragon to proceed with docking.
Following Dragon’s link up to the Harmony module, NASA astronaut and station commander Tom Marshburn pressurized the space in between the Dragon and station hatches and performed a leak check before opening the hatches to welcome the private astronaut crew.
The Axiom crew are joining Expedition 67 crew members, including NASA astronauts Marshburn, Raja Chari, and Kayla Barron, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Matthias Maurer, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Sergey Korsokov, and Denis Matveev.
When the Axiom Space Mission 1 (Ax-1) arrived at the International Space Station, it was the first mission with an entirely private crew to arrive at the orbiting laboratory. It represents both a culmination of NASA’s efforts to foster a commercial market in low-Earth orbit and a beginning of a new era of space exploration that enables more people to fly on more kinds of missions.
The Ax-1 crew will spend more than one week aboard the orbiting laboratory conducting science, education, and commercial activities.
...the space station teams, including mission controllers at NASA and SpaceX, worked to troubleshoot an issue preventing the crew members on station from receiving views from Dragon’s center line camera of the Harmony’s modules docking port. Mission teams worked to route video using a SpaceX ground station to the crew on the space station allowing Dragon to proceed with docking.
That's the way, uh-huh, uh-huh, I like it.
“Elon Musk is going to dominate the commercial space business.”
Already does.
With 143 payloads last year he is certainly leading, but with such low costs, he will be putting some others out of business over the next few years.
Yup, maybe. There weren’t that many companies in the biz before, which was part of the problem, and part of the reason he’s succeeded in dropping the cost per pound to orbit by more than an order of magnitude.
The other new companies are going to be okay I think, plenty of work to go around. And they’re well aware of how they need to innovate in order to compete.
SpaceX has only been orbiting stuff for, hmm, ten years? Less than ten years? Already a sig fraction of all the orbital payloads ever launched went up aboard a Falcon 9. Profitability will have to develop, but I don’t expect an IPO from SpaceX, ever.
Why Falcon 9 is Better than Even SpaceX Thought
April 8, 2022
NASASpaceflight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iQMTrC-spc
I saw this hilarious black comic talking about a black astronaut on both shuttle disasters.
He said NASA stands for Negroes Ain't Supposed to be Astronauts.
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