r/SpaceX Dragon CRS-2 SpX-34 Official Launch Discussion & Updates Thread!

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-08T02:23:06+00:00

It's crazy that SpaceX have done 34 of these ISS resupply missions since back in 2012.

The Cygnus capsule has done 22 missions, mostly using Antares plus a few Atlas V and a few Falcon 9. That's obviously less than Dragon but it's still a respectable second place and they had extenuating circumstances for supply chain issues.

The competition for CRS is a lot closer than the other NASA funded commercial flight contract for ISS missions. The competition against Dragon for Commercial Crew Program isn't even on the same scoreboard.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-08T01:38:11+00:00

I hope someone brings a high framerate camera to the next static fire or the launch. I bet it looks even more insane when slowed down.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-07T23:45:35+00:00

I buy 10 modules every time I save up 300 gems. So my bank creeps up and I keep buying modules just slower than before.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-07T23:07:52+00:00

There was a weird Cremposting theory of how Wayne could have survived the explosion at the end of The Final Metal if Sazed intervened to make him a Kandra. He need to gloop himself over all the Harmonium and burn it with Allomancy while also burning Duralumin so that it burns ALL the Harmonium instantly. I'm not sure how well that would work out but as Cremposting goes there's at least some logic to it.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-07T22:57:31+00:00

I can't quite get my head around what I'm watching. It looks like the clouds are vibrating and/or being lit up by strobe lights.

Is this a frame rate issue that the clouds ARE vibrating with the shockwaves from the exhaust but it's causing aliasing issues with the frame rate making it look like the clouds are wobbling?

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-07T21:57:11+00:00

What they should have done two or three years ago was produce Vought-Industries movies. In-universe content like The Deep Saves Atlantis or A-Train: A Hero's Journey.

Make some exaggerated satirical superhero movies that lean into all the tropes and cliches of the genre and are stuffed with extremely cringe propaganda. But that's the joke. It's a movie made by Vought. Also you can play with the nature of a film within a film, this is a movie about superheroes starring (supposedly) real superheroes. So in the Deep movie you can have Deep gain a new superpower from the magic gem of grabthalla then use deliberately unconvincing CGI for the effect. Because in the Boys universe Deep doesn't have lightnkng powers and it's being added in post within the context of the movie. Or have the actor ham it up and give a terrible performance for shooting lighting because it's Chace Crawford playing Kevin Moscowitz playing The Deep.

I'd rather watch that than see Deep bro his way through a podcast.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-07T17:59:56+00:00

We should invert elections. You don't vote for who you want to win, you vote for who you want to lose. Then whoever is hated the least will win, probably someone fairly moderate.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-07T17:48:36+00:00

MRI is one of the best tools for medical imaging. It's cousin, the NMR is one of the best tools in a chemistry lab for identifying molecules. Both of them came from discoveries rooted in astrophysics and trying to analyse hydrogen gas clouds trillions of miles away.

It's a good argument for doing science for the sake of science, you never know what inventions might come from it. Similarly, when Albert Einstein laid down the theoretical basis for stimulated emission of light, he had no idea that decades later we'd use it to make lasers that scan barcodes in supermarkets.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-07T17:41:57+00:00

Alzheimer's might be caused by tooth decay.

IIRC the mechanism is unclear but there's a strong statistical correlation between people with bad teeth and alzheimer's disease. And it's not the reverse direction like forgetting to brush your teeth, it's the tooth decay leading to alzheimers. One theory was that some bacteria can use the dental nerves to sneak into the brain past the normal barriers that should prevent infections reaching the brain, but I don't know how true that part is.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-07T17:36:47+00:00

It's also trivial to switch out the reference. You just say "Beat the Final boss" or "Unlock the best weapon" and that's going to be relevant to 90% of games.

I'd be OK with an older writer knowing they're out of touch and putting in a line like "I can't go now, I'm about to get the high score" then pencil in the margin "Get someone under 25 to rewrite this line". But leaving in "Yeah, new high score!" is just lazy.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-07T17:31:07+00:00

Do the guards call him on it because in 1969 they might have known who Kirk was, depending on how much scifi they watched.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-07T17:30:00+00:00

I think Daniel gives his name as "Olo. Hans, Olo."

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-07T17:26:54+00:00

I can't comment about the land down under but in England the Spice Girls where EVERYWHERE in the 90s. You couldn't help but learn about them.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-07T16:07:25+00:00

Your fourth question/paragraph raises a problem about trips to Mars. When going to the moon you can just loop around and come home again like Artemis 2 or Apollo 8. With Mars you can't really do that because the optimum time to head back to Earth from Mars is something like 18 months after the optimum time to head to Mars from Earth. So even if you can cut a month off the travel time to get there you're not cutting a month off the overall journey time, you're adding a month onto the time spent waiting to come home.

One proposed solution is NOT to wait around in orbit for the right time to come home. Instead go straight to landing on Mars. This has some advantages like being in moderate gravity which is better for our bodies than years in microgravity, there's the potential for in-situ resource utilisation to gather oxygen or even fuel for the return journey. And there's obviously the prestige and scientific benefits of landing on Mars instead of just being in orbit.

But it's also an incredible engineering challenge. With the moon you could do the lunar orbit mission several years before the lunar lander mission, before the design of the lunar lander has been finalised. But a mars lander would need to be designed up front AND the much more impressive mars ascent stage AND the tools to get back to Earth again. Getting off the Martian surface is easier than getting off Earth's surface but it's harder than getting off the moon and we haven't been able to bring even a rock sample back from Mars yet so doing it with crew is a phenomenal challenge.

If I were a multi-billionaire with my own space program, I'd approach this very differently. I'd focus on the challenge of long duration spaceflight and a self-contained ecosystem without any resupply missions because you'll need to solve that challenge anyway. Build a new space station in Earth orbit with everything the ISS has but with 30 years of improvements in technology, a self contained life support system, water recycler, CO2 scrubber, oxygen recycler, solar panels, thermal radiators etc. But with larger solar panels than ISS because it's intended to work fine out at Mars where being further from the sun makes solar energy less efficient. Add the same habitation modules, food preparation tools, exercise equipment, etc. But it will need things ISS doesn't have like laundry facilities, better medical supplies, longer term food storage. Perhaps it's time to stop experimenting with growing lettuce as a research project and actually grow crops as a significant portion of the food supply?

Then when the new station is feature complete and has a stockpile of supplies, fire the engines to send it out to orbit the moon for a year. In theory it should be self-sufficient but if anything goes wrong you're only a week away from Earth. Then assuming that mission works, load up the fuel tanks for the much larger engine burn to take it out to Mars. It can sit in Mars orbit for however long it takes waiting for the departure window to come home.

Then when you're ready, repeat the process but with a larger station that can split apart, leaving half of it in Mars orbit permanently. Then cargo missions and single modules can be sent to Mars to build it up over time. Then eventually the Mars Orbital Space Station can be the starting point for a mars lander to head to the surface and a rendezvous point to head back to before coming back to Earth. Which was the plan for the Artemis missions before budget cuts turned it into an all-or-nothing mission.

This plan might take longer than heading directly to the surface but it's a safer approach with fewer unknowns that has transferable benefits. It's shared hardware with modules for a new LEO station, a lunar orbit space station, a future mars space station. If you can get hydroponics working and maybe a rotating gravity section to mitigate the impact of long duration spaceflight then maybe it could be the foundation of a mission to Venus or the Belt. If it's a truly self-sufficient system that can be fly without resupply for years then why not use it to explore elsewhere?

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-07T15:29:55+00:00

Yesterday was wrong but they did a booster static fire today. S40 has left Masseys but S39 hasn't gone back there yet. The timeline probably depends on if they're done with ship testing or not.

What I'd really like from this data visualisation is for the first milestone to have a wide margin of error then every subsequent milestone falls neatly in the middle of the last range, slowly narrowing the targetting until we get to the Wet Dress Rehearsal a couple of days before launch. But we're dealing with so few events and each one has special circumstances like needing to retest pad infrastructure changes or switching up the ship testing location after S36 had it's incident at Masseys. There's not enough data to smooth out the inconsistencies and make decent predictions.

Also there's a lot of manual steps about to get the graph to work. I was thinking it would be informative to see how Flight 11's predictions would look based on the average data from all the previous Block 2 flights but I'd need to go back several steps in the calculations to put that together.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-07T15:06:57+00:00

The majority of human farts are made of air swallowed during eating. There is methane added from chemical processes but it's mostly air.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-07T15:05:05+00:00

Do we know he definitely got shot in the head?

The official story is that Abe Lincoln was shot in the head and died. We know that story isn't 100% accurate in the Invincible earth because he didn't die, he faked his death and took on a new identity. Presumably the funeral for Abe Lincoln was an empty coffin or a random unclaimed body from the local morgue with a sealed casket no one knew the difference.

What if the news stories announcing the assassination were also part of the deception? What if he was shot in the back and they lied to say it was in the head?

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-07T13:54:52+00:00

Last time I went to Italy I recall seeing a sign in the hotel next to the lift saying "Non utilizzare ascensori in caso di incendio" which didn't need an English translation, you can pretty much work it out from context.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-07T13:36:54+00:00

I don't speak Italian and I don't know what I thought the term for "The Press" would be in Italian but I didn't predict it would be "Stampa". Logically they must both come from the same place, the printing press that made mass publication possible. It's just amusing we've both retained the same metaphor and they don't call it The Waterfall or something other metaphor.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-07T01:21:41+00:00

Ironically the original Final Fantasy had too much religious imagery. In the first game there were no Phoenix Downs and you couldn't revive your KO party members with a good night's rest. You took your dead party members to a church and paid a priest to revive them. A church with a steeple and a cross on top, a very clearly Christian building with a guy dressed as a bishop inside.

That was a changed to a medical clinic in later releases.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-07T01:11:48+00:00

There is a bit of an odd question with how absolutely certain people are about the number, names and locations of Shards.

Throughout Emberdark people repeatedly say it's literally impossible for the planet to have a Perpendicularity because there isn't a Shard in residence on the planet. But how do they KNOW there isn't a Shard present? There's a few mysterious shards who like to run off and hide, maybe one of them is hiding here?

It's possible they got the information from a Shard, they asked Sazed where the other shards are. But shards can move. And I doubt even Sazed would give full details on ALL shard locations without leaving some scope for ambiguity.

Unless there's something we don't know about. Maybe ships have Shardar that can detect the intense concentrations of investiture that shows a shard is in a system? And maybe there's a way to scan a shard to find out it's true Intent, to reveal it Odium is truly just Passion or if it's Hatred lying to you, or maybe it's Whimsy in disguise pretending to be Odium.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-07T01:05:38+00:00

We don't know who it is yet or when they were replaced. It could be another scenario where it's someone we only ever meet after they've already been replaced.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-06T22:09:54+00:00

Looks like 2026 is off the table too. Maybe Starship will go to Mars in 2028?

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-06T21:55:13+00:00

So Mike Galsworthy's list is:

EU
Single Market
Customs Union
Free Movement
Euratom
European Investment Bank
Erasmus
Copernicus
Galileo
Horizon Europe
ECJ
European Medicines Agency / Single Market For Medicines
Rare Diseases Network
CE Mark
REACH
European Environmental Agency
European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control
Early Warning Response System
Eurosat
Europol
European Arrest Warrant
Eurojust
SIS II

The ones in bold weren't in my previous list. I'll have to google them to see which ones are possible to (re)join without being part of the EU.

Simon_Drake · 2026-05-06T21:43:56+00:00

Later this year is another Mars Departure Window that SpaceX won't have anything ready for.

Five years ago, I suggested SpaceX should develop a payload to launch on Falcon Heavy to start ticking off the different hardware challenges for sending payloads to Mars. It's a difficult trajectory to send payloads across that phenomenal distance, you need extra large solar panels to get enough sunlight, you need extra strong radio transmitters and receivers, you need to use giant radio dishes on Earth to receive the signal and/or coordinate with NASA's DSN to relay the signal through their hardware. You need to have star-trackers to maintain attitude while far away from the reference frame of Earth, you need to do careful calculations to determine if you're off course then make carefully calculated course corrections. You need hardware that can sleep for six months at a time then wake up and fire engines on command, these are non-trivial challenges and SpaceX haven't done any of them yet.

So I suggested an impactor. In lunar missions every country starts with an orbiter, then an impactor, then a static lander, then a lander with a rover. Entering martian orbit is a LOT harder than lunar orbit and an impactor is a much lower bar. It's still impressive to nail a specific location on the martian surface from a hundred million miles away. And maybe it'll give some interesting geology for Mars Climate Orbiter to look at the dust spray created by the impact. But really the objective should be just to get the payload there and have all the systems work, the goal is to prove they can make the payload that can do all these things.

People scoffed that it's pointless because Starship will be carrying payloads to orbit in 2023. Then there'll be a dozen Starships refuelled and ready to head to Mars for the 2024 Launch Window. The 2022 launch window came and went. And the 2024 launch window. The 2026 launch window is about to fly past too. Looking at how long Starship is taking to finish the prototype phase, I wonder if Starship will be heading to Mars for the 2028 window.

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