Sunday, March 03, 2013

Dragon CRS-2 Arrives at Space Station



The second operational mission shows the increasing maturity of commercial ISS resupply, but a thruster glitch that delayed rendezvous by a day reminds us that it's not routine, and will not be for a long time. Space is hard. The venerable Soyuz capsule, which first flew manned in 1967, has experienced significant landing anomalies as recently as 2008. Columbia was destroyed on the 113th Space Shuttle mission.

SPACE.com has a gallery of photos.

The manned equivalent, commercial crew, would be of great value to the United States and ISS. It is unfortunate that commercial crew is so undervalued and underfunded by Congress and NASA relative to the expensive, unnecessary  and counterproductive Space Launch System. These misplaced priorities are glaring in NASA's sequester response, which starves commercial crew in favor of SLS.

No comments: