SpaceX Docking and Recovery

[rockytopva]

Did anyone stay up and watch the launch of the Test Crew Capsule and then the docking with the ISS? It was incredible to watch. It's well worth catching, as it is narrated by SpaceX engineers.

Here is the article from NASA:
SpaceX Crew Dragon Hatch Opened after Successfully Docking to Station – Commercial Crew Program

Here is a video of the docking:

And a video of the splashdown this morning....

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Did anyone stay up and watch the launch of the Test Crew Capsule and then the docking with the ISS? It was incredible to watch. It's well worth catching, as it is narrated by SpaceX engineers.

Here is the article from NASA:
SpaceX Crew Dragon Hatch Opened after Successfully Docking to Station – Commercial Crew Program

Here is a video of the docking:

And a video of the splashdown this morning....

I watched the videos after the event - it reminded me of the space books I read as a child, where astronauts flew to the moon in aerodynamic rocketships that landed upright on legs or fins. This had always been the difference between real space flights and those early imagined ones. When I first saw the SpaceX first stages navigating back to land like those imaginary rocketships, I had the sense that this was my childhood future come true. And it's just intuitively sensible to reuse those boosters.

I had a similar feeling when I saw the first smartwatches - when I bought my first LED watch, you pressed a button to display the time in red LEDs and if you held the button in for a couple of seconds, the date was displayed. Shortly after I bought it, I dreamed I had a watch that had buttons you could press and to display all kinds of information, so much that I got lost among the menu selections.

Now watches go way beyond my dreams, and I'm hopeful I'll see reusable spacecraft technology 'take off' in the same way.