SpaceX Launches a Falcon 9 Rocket Carrying a Crew Dragon Capsule With Four Astronauts (spacex.com) 124
The big launch finally happens in 2 minutes. "All systems are go for tonight's launch at 7:27 p.m. EST of Crew Dragon's first operational mission with four astronauts on board," SpaceX tweeted this morning. But live coverage is already streaming on SpaceX's web site.
Space.com explains it's the first operational flight of SpaceX's "astronaut taxi," the Crew Dragon: Called Crew-1, this will be the second Crew Dragon mission to carry astronauts. NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, along with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi, will lift off from the historic Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:27p.m. EST (0027 GMT) to begin a six-month mission.
Space.com reports that the astronauts completed their 9-mile (14 km) drive to the Falcon 9 rocket on the launch pad inside a pair of Tesla's electric Model X SUVs.
In another report, CBS News has confirmed that SpaceX "plans to reuse the booster for the next Crew Dragon flight." NASA is counting on the Crew-1 flight and follow-on missions by SpaceX and Boeing to end the agency's sole reliance on Russian Soyuz spacecraft for trips to and from low-Earth orbit. NASA has spent $4 billion since 2006 buying seats aboard Soyuz spacecraft and another $6 billion to date on its Commercial Crew Program, ultimately awarding contracts to SpaceX and Boeing... With two successful test flights behind them, NASA engineers were able to certify the spacecraft after a detailed analysis of telemetry and inspections of the flight hardware. It was the first such certification since the space shuttle was being built in the 1970s and the first ever granted a commercially developed spacecraft.
"I believe 20 years from now, we're going to look back at this time as a major turning point in our exploration and utilization of space," said Phil McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight development at NASA Headquarters. "It's not an exaggeration to state that with this milestone, NASA and SpaceX have changed the historical arc of human space transportation...
The station's life support systems, including its water recycling equipment and carbon dioxide removal gear, have been beefed up to support a seven-member crew and additional stores and supplies have been laid in. But the U.S. segment of the station only has four crew "sleep stations" and Hopkins plans to bunk with a sleeping bag in the powered-down Crew Dragon.
Space.com explains it's the first operational flight of SpaceX's "astronaut taxi," the Crew Dragon: Called Crew-1, this will be the second Crew Dragon mission to carry astronauts. NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, along with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi, will lift off from the historic Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:27p.m. EST (0027 GMT) to begin a six-month mission.
Space.com reports that the astronauts completed their 9-mile (14 km) drive to the Falcon 9 rocket on the launch pad inside a pair of Tesla's electric Model X SUVs.
In another report, CBS News has confirmed that SpaceX "plans to reuse the booster for the next Crew Dragon flight." NASA is counting on the Crew-1 flight and follow-on missions by SpaceX and Boeing to end the agency's sole reliance on Russian Soyuz spacecraft for trips to and from low-Earth orbit. NASA has spent $4 billion since 2006 buying seats aboard Soyuz spacecraft and another $6 billion to date on its Commercial Crew Program, ultimately awarding contracts to SpaceX and Boeing... With two successful test flights behind them, NASA engineers were able to certify the spacecraft after a detailed analysis of telemetry and inspections of the flight hardware. It was the first such certification since the space shuttle was being built in the 1970s and the first ever granted a commercially developed spacecraft.
"I believe 20 years from now, we're going to look back at this time as a major turning point in our exploration and utilization of space," said Phil McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight development at NASA Headquarters. "It's not an exaggeration to state that with this milestone, NASA and SpaceX have changed the historical arc of human space transportation...
The station's life support systems, including its water recycling equipment and carbon dioxide removal gear, have been beefed up to support a seven-member crew and additional stores and supplies have been laid in. But the U.S. segment of the station only has four crew "sleep stations" and Hopkins plans to bunk with a sleeping bag in the powered-down Crew Dragon.
Finally! (Score:1)
American astronauts piggybacking off the success of glorious Russian cosmonauts for decade(s).,. they probably have Elon's portrait on dartboards all over the Motherland.
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American astronauts piggybacking off the success of glorious Russian cosmonauts for decade(s)
You do realize we had a whole space race thing, right? Went to the moon, took a few pictures, came home. You know that, right?
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
And he also likely knows that it's been almost a decade since we had the ability to launch people into space on US rockets from US soil. We've been paying something like $20m/seat to ride with the Russians for that period of time.
We've been funding their space program for almost a decade. Yeah, they're not going to be super happy that cash cow is gone.
more like $80m per seat (Score:3, Informative)
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Assuming the boeing flight doesn't end up somewhere in the indian ocean.
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Come on now, don't be racist. The Boeing flights could end up in any ocean.
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the cost of NASA launching on a Russian rocket is more like $80m per seat.
On SpaceX it is $56m per seat
On Boeing it will be $96m per seat
Then, put more seats in the capsule, cost by seat goes down, problem solved! :)
Re:more like $80m per seat (Score:4, Informative)
the cost of NASA launching on a Russian rocket is more like $80m per seat.
On SpaceX it is $56m per seat
On Boeing it will be $96m per seat
Then, put more seats in the capsule, cost by seat goes down, problem solved! :)
The Dragon can already seat 7. NASA only launches up to 4 at a time due to the station being made to sleep 6. For non ISS missions the Dragon will launch up to 7 based on the mission.
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Is I understand it NASA proposes to continue to pay for seats on Soyuz as that gives added redundancy
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Ha! That's not redundancy - that's pathetic. NASA has never had real redundancy with the ISS. Real redundancy would be to have a second spacecraft, at the ISS, able to mount a rescue mission in orbit. Astronauts have the ability to evacuate the ISS, but if something goes wrong with a flight TO the ISS that is above the atmosphere... well, sucks to be you.
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No, real redundancy would have been to built another ISS, in geo-synchronous orbit on the opposite side of the planet. After all, isn't the first rule in government spending "Why build one when you can have two at twice the price"?
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, the US has remained the leader in space ever since the late 1960's - 50 years now! On that basis we are certainly the 'winners' to date. But I still think the most important single step in the space race was just getting a functional payload into orbit - that is, Sputnik.
Space Race (Score:2)
That's because that was when the USSR basically tossed in the towel on their end at that point.
With us having "won", we fell back to more realistic, economical missions and space exploration - drones, remote satellites. If the USSR had made serious motions towards Mars, for example, we'd have continued as well.
Well, that's my theory at least.
Re:Space Race (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because that was when the USSR basically tossed in the towel on their end at that point.
??? Seriously, credit where credit is due. They also got the first man and first woman into space as well as the first living things in space, first lunar probes and rover, and the first spacewalk. Whatever else the USSR was, their space program had plenty of accomplishments. Pretending that they didn't serves no-one.
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And the first artificial satellite.
Re: Space Race (Score:2)
And the Mir space station...
(This is starting to sound like a Life of Brian sketch.)
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And my Axe!
There, now it's a LOTR reference.
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??? Seriously, credit where credit is due. They also got the first man and first woman into space as well as the first living things in space, first lunar probes and rover, and the first spacewalk. Whatever else the USSR was, their space program had plenty of accomplishments. Pretending that they didn't serves no-one.
Nobody's pretending USSR didn't have great space accomplishments. What the OP said is that after the moon landings, they pretty much stopped the race. Which is both a) true and b) says nothing about past accomplishments. You're reading something into the post that the text doesn't claim.
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Well, the lunar rover and some of the probes actually came after the manned moon landing. My point was that the USSR had plenty of their own firsts and they continued to participate in space past the first moon landing. They didn't land astronauts on the moon after the US did, so it's fair to say that they threw in the towel specifically on moon landings after the US, but not really in any other regard. Let's not forget that they had the first space station as well. They also have been a major player in the
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Pretending that they didn't serves no-one.
Point to where anyone said that they didn't.
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Well, Firethorn said that they basically threw in the towel at that point, and suggested that the space race would have continued if the USSR had made serious motions towards Mars. The reality though is that no-one seems to have been ready to tackle Mars at that point, but they did continue a space race with probes and rovers and spaceplanes/shuttles, etc. In the manned arena, their focus went towards space stations, as did the US, then they went into a phase of trying out international cooperation while st
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I don't believe the GP post ever claimed that the USSR did not make any accomplishments. Anyone who knows anything about the Space Race knows that the USSR was leading, right up until the first rendezvous and docking during Project Gemini. That was where NASA started taking the lead.
The USSR still had some great achievements after that point too - they sent a lot of probes to various places including the Moon and the first landing on Venus in 1970, even though the probe crapped out after only about 20 min
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My point was basically that they never threw in the towel. They had accomplishments before the moon landings and they continued after. I didn't give dates for all the firsts I named, but some of them were after the first moon landing. As far as manned space goes, after the moon landings, the USSR seems to have focused mostly on space stations.
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But I didn't pretend that they didn't have achievements. In many ways, they came out the race gate strongly, when the USA didn't even know there was a race on.
But their program was faltering by the time of the moon landings, as I said, they basically chucked the towel in at that point and went to more reasonable goals, as did the USA.
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If the space race is designed as specifically a race to the moon, then it was over at that point, but that's not really throwing in the towel. They did move on to other goals, but I would hardly say they threw in the towel. They still tried to one up the US (and succeeded in some cases) in other goals.
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By throwing in the towel, I meant stopping the further push to send humans further and further.
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Won't somebody think of Laika!
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It wasn't really a race. The USSR never agreed to the goal of getting a man on the moon and didn't assign the project top priority. It was more a question of seeing if the US was able to do anything useful with Apollo programme, and by useful I mean militarily speaking.
For example the N1 rocket which would have taken cosmonauts to the moon was really designed to put large space stations in orbit for the military. They thought that orbit would become the new high ground, with crewed stations for spying and f
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The most important question is: do they still know where their towel is?
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If you think about it, though, it's kind of interesting that we Americans declare the 'finish line' of the space race to be getting man on the moon - a thing that nobody (including us) has bothered to do again since the Apollo program.
Getting a man on the moon was not the finish line it was just the next checkpoint in the space race. Had the Soviets successfully landed a man on the moon there would have been more checkpoints like building a moon base or landing a man on Mars. It only became the last checkpoint / finish line because as OP said the Soviets threw in the towel. The Americans didn't win the space race because they got to the moon first, it wasn't even because they got to the moon and the Soviets didn't. The Americans won beca
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The space race was a big dick waving competition
Only on the part of the politicians, to whom everything is a dick-waving contest. The actual scientists and engineers on both sides were happy when they were first to do this or that aspect of space, but that wasn't the point. The exploration of space was the WHOLE point to them. Sergei Korolev slapped down a Soviet general trying to wrest away resources by saying, "Our mission is much more important than your missiles." If NASA had continued to receive the paltry 4.5% of the budget that it had in 1969
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Not only that, you guys brought a fucking car on the moon and drove it around! How much more manly could that mission have been? None at all!
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Informative)
Less than a decade, actually. The last Space Shuttle mission was in 2011, STS-15. American astronauts have been flying for about fifty years, since 1961. No one should discount the "success of glorious Russian cosmonauts." They have a proven and well-tested launch vehicle that has become a workhorse, not to mention their engines. But to suggest America has been "piggybacking..for decades" is hilarious hyperbole. Get real.
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The last Space Shuttle mission was in 2011, STS-135.
FTFY
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right damn keyboard. thanks
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.9 decades, ftw.
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Since the shuttle program was shutdown the US has been paying billions to NASA who then pays that out to SpaceX to pay out bonuses and to buy space on Russian and Indian launches and spend a little on re-inventing the space program.
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American astronauts piggybacking off the success of glorious Russian cosmonauts for decade(s)
You mean piggybacking off the success of N&zis [xkcd.com]. The Russians also had N&zis working for them, the U.S. simply had more and had better funding.
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You know, in a lot of ways that explains Elon Musk.
Elon Musk is not in the same league as Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun. But what both are also good at is recognising how to spot good designs and human talent. Wernher von Braun, though a Nazzi did employ Jewish engineers from the concentration camps for slave labour in Peenemünde. Can't say that Elon does things quite the same way though. If he did then we would certainly know and the plants would have become a target for huge protests during the brief and tumultuous reign of Sir Donald
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We will never know
Actually we do, he was dismayed by it but powerless to do anything about it. If you wanted to work in rocketry in 1930s Germany you had to join the Party to get funding. If you wanted to work in rocketry in the Soviet Union you had to join the Communist Party. The US had nothing like either one so Goddard had to go begging for alms from millionaires so Von Bruan and Korolev were years ahead of him by 1940.
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We will never know
Actually we do, he was dismayed by it but powerless to do anything about it. If you wanted to work in rocketry in 1930s Germany you had to join the Party to get funding. If you wanted to work in rocketry in the Soviet Union you had to join the Communist Party. The US had nothing like either one so Goddard had to go begging for alms from millionaires so Von Bruan and Korolev were years ahead of him by 1940.
Yes. He was a decent man after his years of having to kowtow to Hitler. Only goes to prove that silence in the face of a tyrant is a tool of oppression of the intellect. First defame those who appose you with and call them "leftist intellectual scum" or libs or dems or whatever moniker you devise. Then belittle and vilify Use twitter like propaganda attacks upon any and all who appose the true path that you are on, even to the extent of calling people of good repute "criminals".
It seems that history has ce
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More that we piggybacked off the failure of Hitler and the success of the Manhattan project.
Rockets were a very inefficient way to attack your enemy in WWII. The V-2 program took a massive amount of Germany's diminishing resources, and had very little effect on reducing the military capability of the allies. In WWII, rockets simply weren't accurate enough, nor were their payloads large enough to make up for that inaccuracy. In short, the V-2 was a mi
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The V-2 wasn't meant to deliver a large payload to devistate the military. It was meant to get past the allied defenses and cause terror in the civilian population of England.
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The V-2 wasn't meant to deliver a large payload to devistate the military. It was meant to get past the allied defenses and cause terror in the civilian population of England.
That's what the V2 ended up being, but Hitler really wanted one or two to take out some significant military or strategic target if he could. He believed that by some kind of miracle, these weapons would somehow win the war for him, even without invading Britain. This fact wasn't lost on the British, who, in an attempt to get the V2's to fall outside of their major population centers and away from military targets mounted a misinformation campaign designed to throw off the targeting by misreporting the impa
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they probably have Elon's portrait on dartboards all over the Motherland.
No, as it has been written before they probably thinking, "damn, we should have sold that ICBM to Elon."
Dragon has reached orbit (Score:2)
Capacity (Score:5, Informative)
Unless I'm mistaken, this is the most number of people launched on a single spacecraft since the shuttle in 2011. Soyuz only supports 3 people. The addition of just one extra seat for this flight is worth its weight in gold. The Dragon Crew can be configured for up to 7 people.
Re:Capacity (Score:5, Interesting)
The addition of just one extra seat for this flight is worth its weight in gold.
I understand your sentiment. But to be pedantic, one kilogram of gold is worth about USD$60,000 in the current market, whereas the cost for SpaceX to put a kilogram in orbit is about $2,720. Just sayin'.
Re:Capacity (Score:5, Informative)
the cost for SpaceX to put a kilogram in orbit is about $2,720.
Cargo and people are vastly, vastly different cost factors. The bulk of what is sent to space on a crewed flight is to keep astronauts alive, weight of emergency escape systems, on and on, so it costs far, far more to send up a kilogram of human. It's estimated NASA will pay $55 million per seat to the ISS. Soyuz costs are $86 million per seat. So yes, the cost of sending a person to space is far more than their weight in gold.
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Excellent points. Thanks for the reply.
Re:Capacity (Score:5, Interesting)
The addition of just one extra seat for this flight is worth its weight in gold.
Sorry, that's way off. NASA pays around $86 million per seat on the Soyuz. So if an astronaut weighs 200 pounds, then that one extra seat on the Dragon is worth their weight in gold ($5.5 million), plus their weight in platinum ($2.5 million), plus their weight in palladium ($6.5 million). That's still only $14.5 million worth. Kinda crazy how expensive it is to get in space when you think of it in those terms. You could literally make 15 solid gold statues of yourself for the cost of one Soyuz seat.
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>I'd be happy to see Boeing and the Russians both step aside, but I guess we need "competition" to keep launch costs down.
Yep. This is an example of different goals. Boeing are after government money. SpaceX is after colonizing Mars. Tying to achieve the latter well has resulted in a much cheaper form of hauling people into space than aiming to haul people into space for as many dollars as Boeing can wring out of the government.
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And the US government complains about subsidies to Airbus, as they shovel truck loads of cash to Boeing. Pot meet kettle.
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Back in 2016 Soyuz seats cost $81 million and SpaceX was predicting $58 million. In the meantime Soyuz seats have increased to $86 million while SpaceX has reduced to $55 million and already flown an astronaut back to earth - and Boeing quotes around $90 million, has grabbed another $287 million in quick cash, and still has not launched nor returned any living astronauts.
I'd be happy to see Boeing and the Russians both step aside, but I guess we need "competition" to keep launch costs down.
The SpaceX costs should go down now that they are allowed to launch using previously used Falcons and Dragons.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Capacity (Score:5, Funny)
I admit I lost the plot on this thread, why are we sending gold statues to the ISS again?
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If we're being really pedantic, we should really be adjusting for reduction in weight at orbital distances from Earth.
If you take 50kg of gold into orbit, you still have 50kg of gold. The kilogram is a unit of mass.
Re:Capacity (Score:4, Insightful)
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The value of gold is not based on its weight, whatever old sayings might say. Otherwise people would be profiting by buying gold in Jakarta and selling it in Helsinki where it weighs 0.39% more.
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Different kind of pedantic here, but the statue needn't be solid gold.
Can't be pure gold (Score:3)
Given how soft pure gold is, you're unlikely to use it to make a statue, solid or not, because it wouldn't be strong enough to support its own weight unless carefully designed.
Put some other stuff in as alloy to bump the structural strength up.
Re:Can't be pure gold (Score:5, Informative)
While pure gold is soft for a metal, it still has compressive strength similar to standard concrete and much higher tensile strength. We appear to be talking about a slightly less than two ton statue, so I think we should be fine in most cases. It depends on the actual form of the statue. The assumption is a statue standing on two feet. In that case, we should expect the two ankles to have about 8 square inches of cross-section each. They should be able to support about 12 times the weight of the statue. If the statue is only on one foot, that's still able to support 6 times the weight of the whole statue.
Where we run into problems is if the statue is in some sort of dance or acrobatic pose. For example, a ballet pointe pose on one foot. The surface area of the toes involved probably wouldn't be enough to support the whole weight and, even if it was just enough, there would be metal fatigue over time as you suggest and the statue would eventually deform and/or collapse.
The statue could just as well be seated or reclined. Overall, I don't think you're going to have a structural problem with the solid gold statue as long as the sculptor doesn't get too ambitious.
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Just alloy your pure gold with 1% titanium and you get something around the hardness of stainless steel. Your statue is then perfectly possible. Admittedly it's no longer pure gold, but who gives a toss.
If you go to 3:1 titanium gold alloy it's an impressive four times harder than pure titanium, though at this point it is mostly titanium, still.
The difficulty is that you have to melt your alloy in a vacuum or inert atmosphere or the titanium will burn.
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Melting the titanium in a reducing atmosphere is basically a solved problem, but you really don't need that for the standard two-foot standing position statue. Even if you want to do the ballet statue or something like a one finger handstand, or something creative like an astronaut suspended in space with the statue supported by an elegantly looping umbilical, you don't need to re-enforce all of it, just the supporting bits.
Honestly, I think the biggest danger is if you're doing animal experiments in space
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Interesting analysis, I enjoyed it. But, one correction. Gold is substantially denser than water which is about the average density of a normal person. So, if I make a "statue of yourself", it has to be a mini-me doll to have same weight as the real person, 15 of them. If I want to scale up to full size me or you, then the weight goes way up. Gold has a specific gravity 19.3 times water, so, rounding off given that 19 is approx 15, means that a full scale gold statue of you or me is on the money of you
Re: Capacity (Score:2)
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NASA is only using Crew Dragon for four astronauts. I know SpaceX originally said seven, and still lists that as the capacity on their website. I seem to recall hearing that NASA had some reason for limiting it to four, as they needed more space for something, but I can't seem to find the details. Surely someone here knows the reason it's only four people on NASA flights?
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> Surely someone here knows the reason it's only four people on NASA flights?
ISS can only support so many people but Tom Cruise and two others are going on a ride in about a year. I suppose that's the 4+3. Two weeks, I believe? Rather pricey, but I would if I were him.
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ISS only has berths to sleep 6. The current mission will bring the number aboard to 7 which requires one to sleep in the Dragon capsule. Other things need tight scheduling such as exercise equipment due to the overload.
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It's kind of depressing really. Skylab was launched in one piece and had a crew of three and cost about $10 billion in adjusted dollars. The ISS has 16 modules, it cost at least $150 billion and it has a crew only double the size of Skylab and an interior volume less than three times that of Skylab. The modules are cramped, noisy and smelly. While there have been all kinds of experiments on welding in space, no attempt has ever been made to, for example, make a larger module by shipping up parts and assembl
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Skylab was occupied for 24 weeks [wikipedia.org] (call it 0.5 years, for simplicity). The ISS has been continuously occupied for over 20 years! [wikipedia.org] It's a monumental achievement!
Using your cost estimates, Skylab cost $20 billion per year. The ISS has only cost $7.5 billion per year of operation, despite its larger capacity.
As a bit of a space nerd, yeah, I'd like to see more ambitious work done with the ISS, but I wouldn't call the current state "depressing."
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I'd like to see SpaceX buy the remnants of Bigelow. Then build their own larger version that can launch in a starship. A single launch could take up a bigelow module over a quarter the mass of the ISS. 4 trips and the resulting volume is far more than the ISS. You would probably have to do "solid" components for some uses such as solar panels for example. Either enlarge the ISS or build a replacement maybe salvaging components from the ISS that are still useful.
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Oh, and the day I don't have mod points . . .
I was disappointed when Mir was deorbited. Apparently the Soviet space agency wanted to boost it into a higher orbit to be left as a museum or maybe cannibalized for parts at a later date, but the generals were afraid that the US would somehow learn something classified and insisted on crashing it.
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Also the whole cost of the ISS was not left to the US. Other countries contributed to it, particularly Russia (which built most of the key modules) and Japan.
Japan started the whole space tourism thing too, with a Japanese journalist paying to visit Mir.
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Skylab was occupied for 24 weeks [wikipedia.org] (call it 0.5 years, for simplicity). The ISS has been continuously occupied for over 20 years! [wikipedia.org] It's a monumental achievement!
I think that's not really a reasonable comparison. Skylab was basically thrown away in favor of the space shuttle. What you're saying is like saying that you bought a Honda Accord for $10,000 dollars, didn't use it for 3 and a 1/2 years, then used it for about 6 months out of another year, then you just abandoned it on the side of the road and you later went out and bought a Mercedes for $150,000 and then used the Mercedes for 20 years and you concluded that the Mercedes was a better value because you didn'
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It just seems like there was so much potential, but we got stuck with...
That's what happens when you let a herd of lawyers set budget and priorities for an engineering program. Lawyers are chronically risk-adverse and have no imagination, that's why they become politicians.
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ISS can only support so many people but Tom Cruise and two others are going on a ride in about a year. I suppose that's the 4+3.
Tiny people require less oxygen, otherwise it would be Cruise and one other passenger.
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Tiny people require less oxygen, otherwise it would be Cruise and one other passenger.
Little people the natural astronauts. Need less life support and less volume. More people to work in space for the same cost.
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Re:Capacity (Score:5, Interesting)
Since they might need to return on a Soyuz in an emergency, so the whole capacity will not be used.
If they lift 7 people, and somehow Dragon fails, it would not be a nice situation to have.
Once they have a backup Dragon parking in ISS the practice might change.
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The ISS's support is rated for 7 ppl and they are adding a 7th berth soon.
Personally, I think that I would rather sleep on the dragon. The ISS is quite loud.
WIth that said, once Axiom and/or Bigelow with the next admin, add a habitat, it will likely enable ISS to hold either 11 or 13 instead (4-5 for axiom and 6 for bigelow). And if it was Bigelow, nice thing would be a major noise damper.
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The Dragon Crew can be configured for up to 7 people.
We can pack way more in.
Back in the late 50's and early 60's, there was a fad amoung college students called phone booth and VW beetle stuffing. They could about cram 20+ folks in.
Musk is a bit of a prankster, so if someone would suggest Dragon stuffing as a PR stunt, he would probably support it.
Now I've seen some documentaries on trains in India, where they increase capacity by letting folks ride on the roofs of trains. So if SpaceX transports some Indian astronauts to the ISS, maybe they just hang o
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Back in the late 50's and early 60's, there was a fad amoung college students called phone booth and VW beetle stuffing.
What is this "phone booth" of which you speak?
god speed them on their way (Score:2)
god bless those who go out into space in ships.
Re:How is this possible? (Score:4, Informative)
Is everybody just too stupid to figure out what's happening?
No, just you. Herd immunity has nothing to do with vaccine efficacy if not everyone has received the vaccine.
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It would be:
- Once everyone(ish) had had the vaccine
- If the vaccine is a sterilising vaccine
The first will take time.
But if it's not a sterilising vaccine, which as far as I know isn't clear yet, then it won't bring herd immunity (ie it reduces the effect of the disease, but doesn't stop you being contagious, so doesn't protect non immunised people).
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No, but apparently you're too stupid to figure out that the vaccine cannot be deployed to all 7B+ people in the world simultaneously.
What, you don't like your lipstick getting smeared? Don't be a selfish douche and just wear a mask until the health experts say we've beaten this thing. If wearing a mask is the largest oppressive issue you have in your life, you should probably count your blessings and stop bitching about inconsequential responsibilities that SAVE OTHER PEOPLES' LIVES.
It's been months now,
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Not only isn't it over, nor is it clear that it will be over shortly, but Trump will continue to be a popular figure among a certain type of person for quite some time. We'll be hearing about him for another decade at least, even if he kicks the bucket tomorrow.
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Oh, the majority of his bullshit will be over in roughly 65 days. At that point, people that choose to pay attention to him still can, but the compulsory media coverage will end. Any protections he has on social media against having his lies taken down will end. He will no longer have access to a room of cameras and microphones ready to broadcast his bullshit - in fact, even Fox News is turning away from his bullshit press secretary because even they know that it's all bullshit and inconsequential.
There