WATCH LIVE: SpaceX crew begins journey home

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groveChuck

U-matic Member
It's been the first commercially crewed mission to the ISS.

I meant to post the separation from the ISS yesterday.

But now the crew is orbiting Earth as they prepare for re-entry, and they're playing great recaps such as spacewalks.
You can scroll back like 11hrs to spacewalks, science experiments, etc.

 
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"Here am I sitting in a tin can..."

God speed and a safe return. First commercial crewed flight return! First one launch/return from USA in years
 
Yes, and soon, a 3500 degree tin can!
And it's an autonomous craft, "just like" an autonomous Tesla, complete with large touch screens like a Tesla...
 
Thank you for the link. It's remarkable how unremarkable this seems to be to the world. There's only 300,000 watching the NASA feed. 50 years ago, the whole world watched .
 
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Paul F said:
Thank you for the link. It's remarkable how unremarkable this seems to be to the world. There's only 300,000 watching the NASA feed. 50 years ago, the whole world watched .
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I wouldn’t use that metric as an accurate reflection. We’re watching on Science Channel. Lots of cable cutters out there, but still plenty of folks who have cable, or have live TV through streaming like Hulu Live.

That said, space flight has become a lot more routine than it was 30, 40, 50 years ago.
 
I was doing some light handyman type stuff yesterday for my Mom as she continues to move and after I finished, before I left, we watched the water recovery live on C-Span. My God. The feed that they had was absolutely horrible. It looked like 2000’s internet video. If I had been at my house, I would have changed the channel or just turned the TV off and gone on about my business.

As I said in another thread last month or so, that despite the significance of it all, there’s just something “meh” about it, now. And it has nothing to do with it being “routine”. I think it’s the commercial, non-NASA, non-governmental, non-military aspect of it. It all seems so “cheap”, like low-budget science fiction. I watched the SpaceX launch on YouTube on the NASA channel about a month ago and that’s the way it felt to me. I then went back and watched STS-1 and several other Shuttle launches and got cold chills and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I can go on YouTube right now and watch a Shuttle launch or Apollo launch and I’ll still get cold chills. The the SpaceX launches, meh. I think it may be psychological/perceptual, because in the past, these were National endeavors. They were a show of force, if you will, of the USA, NASA and the military. Now, it’s something that’s been farmed-out and our astronauts are passengers on a Greyhound bus. Even the launch countdowns and communication between “mission control”. The voices don’t seem to have any authority to them. It’s like they grabbed someone out of a call center and said, “read this”. And the NASA broadcast felt like a C-tier booth calling a C/D Saturday afternoon game.

I know this is real life and not a movie, but there just doesn’t feel like there is any importance or significance behind it like there was when it was really NASA doing it.
 
Run&Gun said:
I was doing some light handyman type stuff yesterday for my Mom as she continues to move and after I finished, before I left, we watched the water recovery live on C-Span. My God. The feed that they had was absolutely horrible. It looked like 2000’s internet video. If I had been at my house, I would have changed the channel or just turned the TV off and gone on about my business.

As I said in another thread last month or so, that despite the significance of it all, there’s just something “meh” about it, now. And it has nothing to do with it being “routine”. I think it’s the commercial, non-NASA, non-governmental, non-military aspect of it. It all seems so “cheap”, like low-budget science fiction. I watched the SpaceX launch on YouTube on the NASA channel about a month ago and that’s the way it felt to me. I then went back and watched STS-1 and several other Shuttle launches and got cold chills and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I can go on YouTube right now and watch a Shuttle launch or Apollo launch and I’ll still get cold chills. The the SpaceX launches, meh. I think it may be psychological/perceptual, because in the past, these were National endeavors. They were a show of force, if you will, of the USA, NASA and the military. Now, it’s something that’s been farmed-out and our astronauts are passengers on a Greyhound bus. Even the launch countdowns and communication between “mission control”. The voices don’t seem to have any authority to them. It’s like they grabbed someone out of a call center and said, “read this”. And the NASA broadcast felt like a C-tier booth calling a C/D Saturday afternoon game.

I know this is real life and not a movie, but there just doesn’t feel like there is any importance or significance behind it like there was when it was really NASA doing it.
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When I watched the Space X launch and they showed the "mission control" room, my thought at the time was that things looked unimpressive and they could have used better stage-crafting. Ordinary looking tables with cables just strung across the floor rather than a raised floor with the cabling run underneath, as in most any tv control room.

I get that Space X is about economy. But they could still include a little more pizazz. I would have put all the folks in mission control in some cool-looking uniform. And built counters for them to work at, rather than just use a bunch of ordinary conference tables.

NASA more had a "show-biz" element to it. And yes, I agree there was a more vested interest when it was "our" government doing something spectacular. There more was ownership for any American viewer. That was "us" doing it. With Space X it is more "them" doing it. You're less watching "us" do something grand and more watching "them" do something grand. Also, of course, the whole space-race, gotta beat the evil Commies element of 1960's space exploration that isn't there today. To some extent this just feels like rich guys having fun with money they have nothing else to do with. ( I realize it is more than that, I'm only saying how it can feel, to some. As if this is all just Elon Musk entertaining himself and figuring out how rich people can be sold rides into space. Not the pressing need that there was in the 60's what with the Soviets and the space-race. That felt more urgent and important. )
 
I watched both the launch and recovery of the Crew Dragon on NASA TV and the thing that struck me most was the anchors, who seemed like recent college grads in their first TV news jobs, haltingly reading from the teleprompters. And they work for SpaceX, so they're probably pretty much expected to be cheerleaders for the company and promote its version of events. No telling how they would have handled it if something had gone seriously wrong. They had nowhere near the gravitas of Walter Cronkite and his sidekick Wally Schirra, or Jules Bergman, or Paul Haney ("the voice of Mission Control"), who were the steady and mature public voices of our space program in the '60s and '70s. (Cronkite also had guests like Arthur C. Clarke and Wernher von Braun in the second chair from time to time.)

They didn't even put their talent on a decent looking set. Looked like they just dragged in some tables and chairs at the last minute. And, like JPNola noted, don't get me started on "Mission Control." It looked almost exactly like the high school computer lab where I taught for 24 years!
 
Alex H. said:
I wouldn’t use that metric as an accurate reflection. We’re watching on Science Channel. Lots of cable cutters out there, but still plenty of folks who have cable, or have live TV through streaming like Hulu Live.

That said, space flight has become a lot more routine than it was 30, 40, 50 years ago.
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Yeap, when Russian firstly sent the human to space, it was so unbelievable like the invention of the phone without buttons, but today both these things are ordinary. Still, space exploration has changed every sphere of our life, but they have to make something special again in order to attract everyone's attention.
 
It’s simply less exciting now, and now fairly routine activities. Years ago when I was an active radio jam talking to the guy in the Skylab was exciting. Now I can pick up a radio and talk to anyone with a similar one in the whole world. The fun has gone. Mars might work for the public, but the youngsters want everything now, not drawn out, so I doubt even Mars will merit more than a Facebook live stream. Sad really.
 
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