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SpaceX's Dragon capsule was launched aboard a Falcon 9 rocket rising from Florida, and at the end of its flight the Dragon parachuted down into the Pacific Ocean, 500 miles off the coast of Southern California. The splashdown and recovery echoed the way space missions were run back in the 1960s, during the glory days of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space efforts. No astronauts were aboard this time, but SpaceX founder Elon Musk said that if there were passengers in the capsule, "they would have had a very nice ride."
Stay tuned for updates on the Dragon's maiden space mission by checking Twitter (via @b0yle or @SpaceXer), or checking Cosmic Log's SpaceX coverage.
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very proud of space x.go for cheaper more affordable space flights.good job guys!!!
Great Job SpaceX! Perhaps we won’t have to rely on the Russians to service the International Space Station after all…
Congrats space-x ! A hugh day to see private corporate space flight!
Ok.... how many of these launches equate to one Shuttle launch? Oh, that's something like 8 or 9 to 1.
Now, can they haul humans up there and recover them? I don't think so....
So, what is this going to cost us in the long run versus the Shuttle or a viable replacement?
Hmm, where do you get the 8 to 9 to 1? Falcon is listed as capable of bringing more than 6 tons of cargo (3 pressurized, 3 unpressurized) compared with shuttle's 25 tons. That's about 4 to 1, cargo-wise. Why do you think the Dragon couldn't be used for humans? It will require a launch escape system and other safety features, but NASA is working with SpaceX on that (and other companies are working on escape systems as well). Dragon should be capable of bringing up seven people.
If you divide $1.6 billion by 12 for the cargo flights, you get a figure of $133 million per launch for cargo, compared with the estimated $1 billion for a shuttle launch.
Development cost to NASA, under the COTS program, is $278 million. Estimated development cost for the Ares 1 rocket and the Orion capsule, which are more similar to Falcon 9 and Dragon than they are to the shuttle, was on the order of $37 billion to $50 billion. I know that figure seems unbelievable, but that's what's contained in this GAO report:
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09306sp.pdf
I'm sure people more knowledgeable than I am can expand upon and/or correct these figures.
Interesting...
From the figures you quote the Shuttle wasn't quite as economically horrible as popularly let on. A little less than 2x the cost plus the astronauts require an extra flight. The other thing to point out is that an unfortunate fact of space flight is that launching heavy payloads always cost more per ton than light ones. This is true even with expendable vehicles.
While the shuttle was supposed to save money not cost more which it undoubtably did, it wasn't quite the white elephant that some make it out to be. I have just seen articles claiming almost 4-5x the cost of an expendable vehicle.
However,
What amazes me the most about this accomplishment isn't launch cost improvement but the development time/cost for this vehicle. No way NASA could have developed something like this so fast & so cheaply. I am constantly amazed at the money that gets wasted redesigning things, making projects try to serve multiple objective then only to cancel them & restart them again with a new objective every time a new administration comes along.