Falcon 9 Moves To The Pad For Checks

Good Luck - God Speed Space X!

Carl (Surfduke) Hewlett

In these photos of this rollout the LV lacks its 5.22m diameter payload fairing...

I think they're omitting the larger payload faring because in the year since the last rollout they changed the first payload to the Dragon test model which doesn't need the faring.

Go SpaceX! It will be nice to see this launch be successful amid what seems to be hopeless times.

They're getting ready for a hot fire. No fairing required at this point.

Andy is correct. SpaceX is launching a non-functional Dragon on the first flight so no faring is needed.

As did all other programs that NASA or any other space agency has done. Launch a dummy see if it works, rinse and repeat, progressively making the mission parameters greater in difficulty and duration. I'm hopeful for space x and its very ambitious launch manifest.

I wish Space-X the best for this first test of the Falcon 9.

Just want to remind everyone of the obvious. This is a first test flight. However it goes, it is what it is - and anything less than complete success shouldn't be jumped all over as proof of anything except that building rockets is complicated and failure is part of the journey to success.

They will launch this rocket with a staff of less then a fifty. The whole company has only about a thousand people. NASA could learn a lesson from this.

Elon Musk is well aware of the bloat government involvement can create.

To quote the great science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein:

"An elephant is a mouse built to government specifications."

(From the Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Time Enough for Love.)

tinker

"Just want to remind everyone of the obvious. This is a first test flight. However it goes, it is what it is - and anything less than complete success shouldn't be jumped all over as proof of anything except that building rockets is complicated and failure is part of the journey to success."

I agree. I will take time for a new company to come up to speed, more so for untried human spacecraft. My concern is that these wild timelines for commercial companies providing US HSF are not taking these learning steps into account. Garver has said that SpaceX could be flying humans in space in 3 years.

I am in favor or commercial companies providing at least some capability for getting astronauts to space, but am against putting all of our capabilities on these risky untried proposals. My thoughts are NASA still needs to provide a national capability for access to space, especially in areas that are too risky or unprofitable for these commercial companies.

> I am in favor or commercial companies providing at least some capability for getting astronauts to space, but am against putting all of our capabilities on these risky untried proposals.

Yup. That's why we also have proposals from Boeing, Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada, and the United Launch Alliance. It ensures that we don't end up with all our eggs in one basket like we did with Constellation.

"SpaceX could be flying humans in space in 3 years."

It will be a private crew, not a NASA crew.

Space X employees will play cards to decide who climbs on the rocket... Going all in, for a seat on Dragon!!!

"Just want to remind everyone of the obvious. This is a first test flight. However it goes, it is what it is - and anything less than complete success shouldn't be jumped all over as proof of anything except that building rockets is complicated and failure is part of the journey to success."

I feel it IS fair to jump on them if a failure occurs that would have been caught by expensive "old-space" processes. It still may be faster, cheaper and maybe even better with some failures, but you need to understand the costs as well as the savings.

"That's why we also have proposals from Boeing, Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada, and the United Launch Alliance. "

Proposals for what? When did NASA submit a request for proposals for a replacement crew spacecraft? The ones recently awarded by NASA seemed to be more for things like "development milestones".